Challenges and strategies to improve the availability and geographic accessibility of physicians in Portugal.

ABSTRACT:

Background

Shortages of physicians in remote, rural and other underserved areas and lack of general practitioners limit access to health services. The aims of this article are to identify the challenges faced by policy and decision-makers in Portugal to guarantee the availability and geographic accessibility to physicians in the National Health Service and to describe and analyse their causes, the strategies to tackle them and their results. We also raise the issue of whether research evidence was used or not in the process of policy development.

Methods

We analysed policy and technical documents, peer-reviewed papers and newspaper articles from 1995 to 2015 through a structured search of government websites, Portuguese online newspapers and PubMed and Virtual Health Library

SUBMITTER: de Oliveira AP 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC5364681 | biostudies-literature | 2017 Mar

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature