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Health Certificate

With the schools and nursery’s starting to opening their doors, here on the Silver coast after a long summer, we are asked to bring a new health certificate for our children. Which to me sounds very sensible in these times with swine flu, and other viruses floating about.
Some schools won’t let the children through the door without one, while others are more lenient.
But no-one seems to have considered the following: It’s impossible to get a doctors appointment in August as the Centre do Saude literally running on skeleton staff. Come September you are lucky if you manage to get an appointment in the first couple of weeks, as you will be queuing with the rest of the population at break of dawn.

So this is what I did with my two little boys yesterday, it was my third attempt to get an appointment. After three hours we finally got to see the doctor, so my son could have his check-up and then finally the sought after certificate.
We sit down and the Doctor asks him how he is, he says fine, she signs the paper and off we go. Is that really how it is suppose to be? We waited three hours for a two minute meeting with the doctor, who did not check if my son was healthy or not. Sure he looks healthy, but that is beside the point.

So at this point I am rather confused, what is the health certificate for? Just to prove that we know where the doctor is in case our children get sick? Shouldn’t this be taken more seriously?

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