Doctor Rita Sá Machado, 36 years old, took office yesterday as general director of Health, replacing Graça Freitas in the position, which she will assume for a period of five years.

For the president of the National Association of Public Health Doctors, Gustavo Tato Borges, the choice of Rita Sá Machado “is a bold choice on the part of the Ministry of Health in a young doctor specialising in public health, with very good training and very good professional qualities.”

“It could prove to be a breath of fresh air for a renewal of the Directorate-General for Health that was so needed”, said Gustavo Tato Borges to the Lusa agency.

The public health doctor only regretted the way the process went, since Rita Sá Machado was chosen by the Minister of Health, after the Recruitment and Selection Commission for Public Administration (CReSAP) was unable to come up with a list of three names of "deserving candidates" to propose to the Government.

“Doctor Rita Machado did not deserve to have this cloud over her choice, neither Doctor Peralta Santos nor Doctor Rui Portugal deserved to have been treated the way they were” because they all meet the conditions to be considered with merit for the choice as director general of Health, he stressed.

In his opinion, the curriculum evaluation process on the part of CReSAP raises “many doubts”, arguing that the recruitment committee should inform the experts about the criteria that led to it not identifying three candidates with merit.

For Tato Borges, this situation “hinders the credibility of the entire process”, arguing that the DGS and the Ministry of Health should also be clarified to “make everything very clear”.

Despite this entire process, he stated that “the choice of Rita Sá Machado is seen positively” as “a hope at the end of the tunnel” for the modernisation of the DGS, which has been called for “for a long time”.

Regarding the biggest challenges for the DGS, the person responsible highlighted the need to find “a new operating model, a new legal framework” that allows the institution to become “more agile, quicker to respond, and rise to the challenges”.

He highlighted the second major challenge as attracting human resources to work with the DGS staff.

“Its staff is depleted, the few professionals who work with the DGS, or the vast majority of them, are only working partially and we needed the DGS to have a strong and full-time technical staff, but in order to achieve this it is necessary to make the DGS more attractive”, he argued, considering that Rita Sá Machado could play this role.

On the other hand, it is necessary to equip the DGS in technical terms: “It is necessary to prepare it for the next pandemic”, providing it with IT resources and applications, but also with contingency plans and forms of action so that it can “ respond to the challenges of the next pandemic when it arrives because there is no doubt that it will arrive”.

The new director-general of Health worked in Geneva, as an advisor to the World Health Organization (WHO) in the area of ​​Health and Migration. Previously, she was an advisor for Migration and Humanitarian Affairs at the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, Permanent Mission in Portugal, and head of the Epidemiology and Statistics division at DGS.