Advanced training and post-graduate medical education are also a priority aim for the Faculty of Medicine of the University of Lisbon (FMUL).

In keeping with this aim, the FMUL has organized training programmes leading to an academic qualification, namely Masters and PhD, as well as other activities that do not lead to an academic degree, designated as Refresher and/or Improvement Courses.The Advanced Training Institute (IFA) is the FMUL structure that, in the areas of Medicine, Biomedical Sciences and Health Sciences, centralizes the organization and operating of these training activities.The structural and methodological alterations introduced into Higher Education through the Bologna Process and the opening by the Ministry of Health to the promoting of scientific and academic qualification during Medical Internships ( a PhD Programme for Interns), brings new challenges and raises new opportunities in this area of intervention by the FMUL.

The aim is clear: to increase the varied supply of post-graduate courses, to create support solutions for continuous medical education, to innovate and create mechanisms for controlling the continuous process of assessing the quality and structuring the PhD programme for clinical medicine so that it may be attractive for the interns who frequent the internship programmes.

The IFA provided continuity and more dynamic structuring to other initiatives such as the Post-Graduate Studies Office (GEPOG) and the Department of Medical Education, seeking to provide a response to health professionals’ solicitations and academic and assistance needs, and developing a capacity for efficient management of these advanced and post-graduate training programmes.

In this sense it is important to reflect upon the path travelled, what the most relevant aspects that should be reinforced are, and what are the less successful one that need modifying.

The positive aspects are the following:

The existence of an organizational and cultural historical background in post-graduation at the FMUL.
The Advanced Training Institute, with its dynamic, knowledge and capacity to intervene in post-graduate training.
The socio-professional value of its human resources and innovating dynamic.

The less positive aspects are the following: 

The need for greater awareness by the academic body and of medical society of the need to develop advanced training programmes and of their social importance.
The improvement of the management software in order to facilitate administrative dialogue between providers and consumers of the programmes developed.
Greater links between the programmes of hospital and academic post-graduate training.

In keeping with the objective assessment of the IFA, its governing board considers that the Ministry of Health’s opening up to the promoting of scientific and academic qualification during Medical Internship, the implementation of integrated training programmes, among those that lead to an academic degree, and the Refresher and Specialisation Course that do not directly lead to the granting of an academic degree, are new possibilities of intervention that ought to be contemplated.

The philosophy underlying this project is clear: a reinforcing of interventions common to the institutions on this academic campus: Faculty of Medicine of the University of Lisbon, Santa Maria Hospital and the Institute of Molecular Medicine, opening up to other socio-professional health groups, creating synergies with other institutions, and the reinforcing of the e-learning programmes aimed at health professionals.

In order to continue, it is fundamental to overcome the constraints resulting from excess compartmentalisation of training, and to guarantee the quality of the training actions and their relevance for the professional development of doctors and all other health technicians.

The present moment is a challenge and an opportunity to which the IFA will be able to correspond at the service of medical and health sciences education and of the modernization programme of the Faculty of Medicine of the University of Lisbon.

Professor J. Fernandes e Fernandes
Dr. Lucindo Ormonde