The Northern Doctors Union (NMS) has filed a complaint with the Ombudsman against the new model for choosing the vacancies of the Specialized Training 2026, asking for its suspension and the return this year to face choice.
© Lusa
07/10/2026
by
Lusa
A complaint, presented on September 30 and released today to the agency Lusa, gives continuity to the intervention initiated by the SMN on September 16, when the union asked the Minister of Health and the Central Administration of the Health System (ACSS) clarifications about the lots of candidates, the algorithm of allocation of vacancies, the number of options allowed and the destination of the vacancies refused.
According to the union, the answer of the ACSS did not clarify the questions asked.
By 2025, each candidate chose a vacancy in order of classification, knowing the vacancies available at the time of choice. For 2026, ACSS announced an exclusively ‘online’, asynchronous and batch-based system.
“It’s not just about trading a room for a computer. He changed his own way of choosing”, the union points out in a statement, which met with about 30 internal doctors of General Training to hear their concerns.
In statements to the agency Lusa, Tiago Ramos, from the direction of the SMN and the National Federation of Doctors (FNAM), explained that the union moved forward with an urgent complaint to the Ombudsman's Office because the request for clarifications “fell in a mess”.
He also criticised the fact that the new model was announced “very much on top of the event”, adding that it was the associated doctors themselves who sought the union to “ask for help” in view of the doubts raised by the new system.
The complaint calls for urgent intervention before the beginning of the choices and advocates that in 2026 a sequential, face-to-face or electronic system be maintained, but synchronous and in real time.
“Modernizing cannot mean removing transparency, information or rights. Digitizing a contest cannot serve to change the rules after it has started”, defends the union.
For Tiago Ramos, candidates must know the rules in advance to “program and plan their life.”.
One of the main criticisms concerns the time available to order preferences, which James Ramos considers “a factor of inequality.”.
According to the manager, the first lot may have about 10 to 15 days to prepare the list, while the remaining candidates will have just over 13 hours to decide after knowing the available vacancies.
The union also disputes the distribution by lots and the obligation to present a long list of preferences in advance, without knowing which vacancies will be available when the time of choice comes.
According to Tiago Ramos, the list may reach “almost 150 vacancies”, forcing candidates to anticipate decisions that, in the previous model, were made based on the offer available at that time.
The leader also warned of situations where the choices of different candidates are related, such as couples, family members or people who wish to remain in the same region. In this context, it considers that candidates “will choose a little blindly”.
“ One can stay in Lisbon and another can stay in Porto. When, perhaps, both of them stayed in Coimbra, they preferred to stay together in Coimbra”, he exemplified, considering that the new model is causing “a great stress” to doctors in a “defining moment” of their career, with consequences for “the coming decades”.
On September 18, the ACSS explained that a new asynchronous model was the subject of technical and functional tests, having “beefied the participation of physicians appointed by the Doctors Order and the National Board of Medical Internship”, who contributed to the “improvement of the final solution”.