Health Ministry downplays wave of specialist resignations despite warning over lack of replacements

Paraguay’s Health Ministry says it has received only 62 resignation letters from doctors and specialists. The medical union Sinamed puts the figure at 431 and warns it could rise to 600, exposing a sharp dispute over the scale of the staffing crisis in public hospitals.

Of the 62 letters recorded at the ministry’s registry, only 21 met the required legal formalities, according to Juan Marcelo Estigarribia, the ministry’s director general of cabinet. The other 41 included scanned signatures, a format the ministry does not accept.

The union says resignations affect critical services including pediatric intensive care, anesthesiology, neurosurgery and pediatric surgery. At the Hospital de Trinidad and the Regional Hospital of San Ignacio in Misiones, the entire staff reportedly submitted resignations.

Estigarribia said the ministry has 10 days to decide whether the resignations are valid. He also pointed to “very ambiguous issues” in the terminology used by some doctors, arguing that anesthesiology is classified within the system as a function rather than a post or department headship. The ministry says precise interpretation could determine whether disputes become judicial rather than administrative.

To support its confidence that vacancies can be filled, the ministry cited a database of applicants from recent civil-service regularization competitions. Those contests offered 2,310 posts and attracted more than 13,000 applicants, while the economic team later authorized 11,100 positions. Sinamed says the database comes from general competitions and does not specifically cover specialist and subspecialist posts, whose training requires years of residency. The ministry did not directly address that distinction.

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very ambiguous issues