Born in September 1988 in Porto, Sofia Baptista is a young researcher at CINTESIS, a teacher and mother of two children. She did classical ballet at the Royal Academy of Dance and taught while doing her medical degree. She has been writing poetry since she was a child. The doctor was at the frontline of the battle against the COVID-19 pandemic. She saw many patients in the emergency room and many more as a GP. Her dream of becoming a journalist was left behind but communicating is in her soul.

‘My passion, in consultations, in college, or in life, is communication. I’m always trying to find the balance point that allows me to be happy communicating,’ she says.

When the young researcher was a child, she recalls, ‘I had wards with dolls, to which I gave health care, but I always went around with the tape recorder my parents gave me, interviewing everyone. I made whole television news programmes’.

Sofia Baptista studied at the Fontes Pereira de Melo School, from which she left with an average grade of 19.7 to the Faculty of Medicine of the University of Porto (FMUP). There she completed her Master’s in Medicine in 2012. She recalls that it was a “difficult journey” and that resilience was one of the lessons learnt during that time.

‘I have always been a very dedicated student, very rigorous and curious. I’ve always liked several things. But I was also lucky enough to have fantastic teachers, like my primary teacher, who read Sophia de Mello Breyner to us under the plane trees at school. I remember, when I was seven, asking my parents for the book of “Anne Frank”. Fortunately, they encouraged my taste for culture,’ she says.

When the time came to choose a specialty, the doctor opted for General and Family Medicine, due to the “width of problems it covers”. She did a post-graduate course in Research Methodology in Health Sciences at the Autonomous University of Barcelona (UAB), in 2014, and went on to do her PhD, at FMUP, which she finished in 2020. The teacher did not want her doctorate to be the peak of a career, as used to be the case, but rather the beginning.

At CINTESIS, she has primarily researched the area of shared decision making in health care. At issue is the transition from a very paternalistic and asymmetric doctor-patient relationship model, in which the doctor decided everything, to a shared decision model. She has also studied the importance of decision aids’ format (leaflets, videos, online content, etc.) on the quality of decision making. She has taken the matters raised by her clinical practice to her research and vice-versa, that is, she applies the knowledge and techniques she has learnt in research to her consultations.

‘Research always must start from the matters that arise in our daily lives. I myself realized that the shared decision-making model is not something innate in the doctor; it’s something you learn, you train. Not all patients are ready for it either, they still have the paternalistic model in their heads. This can be trained! Patients like to be heard, they like their opinion and their values to be considered. This has been very rewarding,” she continues.

She was a doctor in the Emergency Department of the University Hospital Center of São João (CHUSJ) until 2021, having been at the frontline of the battle against the COVID-19 pandemic. She is currently a specialist in General and Family Medicine at the Family Health Unit (USF) Homem do Leme, in Porto, co-editor of the Portuguese Journal of General and Family Medicine (RPMGF) and Invited Assistant Professor at FMUP.

And because the clinical eye can also be trained, Sofia Baptista created the course “To observe: from art to clinic” which was distinguished as an InovPed unit by the University of Porto. ‘They are very challenging classes because they are out of the box, but it’s great to get out of our comfort zone. Besides communication, observation is another essential skill for a doctor. What we see in patients can make a difference, even for a correct diagnosis. That training of the eye that you do when observing works of art has a parallel with the clinical eye. It was my idea, but I discovered that Harvard Medical School has a very identical course’, she says.

Sofia Baptista is also a “medical correspondent” for CNN Portugal, providing a weekly update on present medical and scientific news. It all started when she decided to do a “casting”, competing against thousands of candidates. ‘It was an old dream that I never thought would come true. Here I can combine both aspects: I can talk about important issues to increase health literacy (the media has a huge potential to raise the public’s health literacy) and take part in the excitements of the news.

1-Year Ambition

I will develop a randomized trial that will examine the impact of patients’ personal values on shared decision-making. In clinical practice, patients to whom I present the benefits and risks of prostate cancer screening, for example, respond very differently. If you save one death in a thousand patients screened by PSA, some want to be that patient. Others understand that they would not want to live with the side effects of treatments, such as erectile dysfunction. Values seem to play a very important role.

10-Year Ambition

I would like to dedicate more time to research and teaching, without leaving clinical practice. I would like to continue in this line of research – shared decision in health care, in CINTESIS, which has given me a lot. I am very grateful to the people with whom I have collaborated. They have been a huge support.

Life Beyond Research, Teaching and Clinical Practice

I am a dreamer. I take many risks and I live life very intensely. I still write, but very little, basically scattered poetry. I would love to write a book, but I don’t think it’s time for that yet.

I did classical ballet from the age of eight until I was pregnant with my second daughter about two years ago. I was always very happy in ballet, but I was never a fantastic dancer. I realized very early on that I didn’t have what it took to go all the way. It was a passion, an escape and a way to have extra income when I was doing medical school.

I dedicate myself a lot to my family and my two children, Frederico, who is almost five, and Rosarinho, who will be two years old. I love travelling, but I don’t travel much. It doesn’t have to be long-distance journeys. It is an escape, a form of catharsis.

People often ask me how I have time for everything. Of course, there is a limit, and you must know it, otherwise you can get exhausted, but sometimes when you have more things, you manage your time and your priorities better.