Carlos Martins, 48 years old, is the principal investigator of the most recent research group to be created at CINTESIS, Health for All, whose objective is to promote and foster research in the fields of General and Family Medicine and Primary Health Care, in Portugal.
He was born in Germany, the son of Portuguese emigrants and lived in Kaiserslautem, until the age of 10. As a child, he wanted to be a doctor, inspired by his pediatrician, but also wanted to be a soccer player, influenced by Socrates, Brazilian national team player and doctor. “He was one of my models,” he confesses.
From the 7th year of school, he lived in Porto, where he studied. In 1996, he graduated in Medicine from the Abel Salazar Institute of Biomedical Sciences (ICBAS) and specialized in General and Family Medicine at the Carvalhido Health Center in 2002. He was attracted by the fact of being a “general” doctor having to deal with the complete life cycle, going from infants to the elderly.
He was invited to work for the São João Health Center, which at the time was managed by the Faculty of Medicine of the University of Porto (FMUP). The purpose was to develop research, for the sake of “pleasure and vocation”. He became a faculty member and joined the Doctoral Program in Clinical and Health Services Research (PDICSS in Portuguese).
He has been an integrated researcher of CINTESIS for several years. Since 2018, he coordinates the most recent research group of this unit, Health for All. The name comes from the motto of the International Conference on Primary Health Care held in 1978 in Kazakhstan under the aegis of the World Health Organization (WHO). The event was a historic milestone, impacting health systems around the world, including the Portuguese National Health Service.
At present, Health for All integrates specialists in General and Family Medicine, but the goal is to extend the group to other professionals. The areas of study are all covered by Primary Health Care (PHC), from clinical practice to organization, going through the doctor-patient relationship, nursing, psychological support, among others,” explains the researcher.
For Carlos Martins, the new group can leverage, in a significant way, the research carried out in this field. “In General and Family Medicine, it is still difficult to develop research of sufficient quality and robustness to be published internationally. We have a large number of clinicians working on the ground and they have good ideas for research, but often with size or methodological problems that may be impediments to publication in indexed journals,” regrets the specialist.
In addition, “there is not a great tradition in PHC research. The major research projects carried out with the support of the pharmaceutical industry are mainly allocated to hospitals and other specialties. Our aim with this group and resorting to the networking that CINTESIS allows, is to overcome these obstacles and help colleagues develop from scratch the best research methodologies for relevant and publishable conclusions.”
Another goal of Health for All is “to build bridges with healthcare players and potential funders. It is not easy to get funding and convince partners that it is possible to do clinical trials in PHC, but it is possible, and already there is interest of the pharmaceutical industry to develop studies based on real-world data. Well, the real world is in PHC. We believe we have all the conditions to move forward.”
Alongside his research activity, Carlos Martins is an assistant professor at the Department of Community Medicine, Health Information and Decision (MEDCIDS) of FMUP and the person responsible for several Continuing Education Courses (Evidence-Based Preventive Medicine, Systematic Review and Meta-analysis in General and Family Medicine and Inform Science & Health). He is also a family doctor and the Family and General Medicine Coordinator at the CUF Institute in Porto. He is also dedicated to health promotion and disease prevention online, acting as the webmaster of the platforms MGFamiliar and Dr. Share. He is the current president of the European Network on Prevention and Health Promotion (EUROPREV), of the World Organization of Family Doctors (WONCA Europe). In this context, he has been one of the advocates of Quaternary Prevention, one of his main lines of research.
“When we talk about prevention, especially in the screenings area, we refer to medical interventions in people who are healthy and so it is easy to harm the patient. Intensive screening is leading to overdiagnosis. We are increasingly concerned with assessing benefits and harms, and often there is no such thing as a single decision. Here we enter the area of shared decision,” he says.
If clinicians are becoming increasingly more aware of this need, what can we expect from the patients?” Right now, the Health for All group has an ongoing research project that will assess whether the Portuguese population wants to be involved in the medical decision-making process. Possibly, this will be variable. Some people may prefer to be involved, others may prefer a paternalistic model. This is something we have to find out,” he concludes.
What is your 1-Year Ambition?
Let’s talk first about dreams. We have, in our research group, several PhD students. Coordinating them has been very fulfilling. Watch them complete their doctoral projects would be an accomplishment.
What is your 10-Year Ambition?
10 years from now, the dream is to see the objectives proposed by our research group materialize: to see the research in General and Family Medicine and in Primary Health Care more robust, growing in quality and quantity, having an impact on daily life. I would also like to contribute for the specialty to be more solid within academy.
How is life beyond research?
I’m always working, but I do it with great pleasure. I spend a lot of time with family. I have two children, Maria, who is 20 years old, and Pedro, 17 years old. I really like sports. It’s something I do not do as much as I would like, but whenever I can, I play soccer with friends and family. I like to ride my bicycle for some miles; It’s something that feels good and comforts me. I really like taking pictures. I travel two to three times a year and I shoot a lot of photos, which I share on social networks. But I do not travel as much as it seems. So, I’ve even created the hashtag #eunaoestouondeofacebookdizqueestou (I am not where Facebook says I am) [laughs].