This change is the result of the publication, in December and January, of legislation that will come into force in April and that defines the rules for organising and managing the National User Registry (RNU) and registration in primary health care.

In recent years, users of the National Health System (SNS) who had not used the system for five or more years had their primary care registration deactivated, being classified as “non-users”.

In addition to inactive primary care registration, these users also lost their family doctor.

Order No. 1668/2023 defined the organisational rules and management mechanisms relating to the RNU, as well as those for registering citizens with the SNS and enrolling in primary healthcare, including a measure, which caused great controversy, which determined that Portuguese citizens with tax residence abroad would have their registration deemed as “inactive”, and has since been suspended.

This order created several types of user registration – active (with updated data), temporary (for a period of 90 days to complete the process) and inactive (when the requirements for active or temporary registration are not met, in addition to deceased citizens).

In December of last year, it was revoked and replaced by another (14830/2024), which comes into force in April and changed the typology of the RNU registration, which now has other definitions: “updated”, “in progress” (with a period of 180 days for the data to be updated), “incomplete” (with missing data after 180 days) and “historical” (users who died).

In January, the publication of another dispatch (40/2025), which also comes into force in April, determined that the update of the primary healthcare lists would take into account the new registration types.

This diploma defined that foreign residents and non-resident nationals and foreigners, registered with a family doctor but without a record of medical consultation in primary health care in the last five years, become “eligible for reformulation of the family doctor assignment”, that is, they lose the current one.