Even as a barely-speaking toddler, Patrizia Sofia Couto da Rocha, told her parents after being sent to bed: “mummy, daddy, sleeping is a waste of time”. Ever since that, she’s been sleeping an average of 4/5 hours a night and uses the rest of the time to practice medicine, do research, and design shoes.

She’s also an entrepreneur devoted to bring technology and knowledge to all. And so, we talked to her in-between breaks of the organization of the e-Health Summit, a conference that aimed to boost the use of ICTs in Healthcare Services.

Patrizia admits she was never good with endpoints and always had too many passions to pursue just one of them. After finishing school (younger than it was supposed to be) she made a trade-off with her parents. She would go into medical school, but before that she would do a Fashion Design Course at Central Saint Martins, London.

She remembers the English capital as “a vibrant city” where she lived in a tiny attic in Bayswater and where she started working as a shoe designer. But the most important outcome was the people she met. In fact, to this young entrepreneur, “people are what matters the most in every experience”. And it was really because of these people, especially because of two colleagues (one French and one Italian), that she entered the shoe fashion industry. At the time, the three of them started designing entire collections for other brands. When she returned to Portugal to study medicine, she continued her work as a freelancer shoe designer and conciliated that with her studies. She also decided to take another degree on Chinese Medicine, mostly done during the weekend, and also did a minor in Politics.

By then, her father, an economist related to shoes industry himself, proposed her a challenge – she would have to revitalize a brand that was mostly asleep – Jackson’s Shoes. She suddenly foresaw this as a way to conciliate medicine with shoe making. As such, Patrizia designed women high-heels shoes with a special construction that would not only alleviate pain, but also prevented problems derived from bad postures. Much of this was only possible because of her knowledge in Chinese medicine, but also in anatomy.

Parallel to this, she proceeded with her work as a medical student and decided to specialize in internal medicine in Algarve. It was then that she decided to make an MBA, because she felt the urge to have a project of her own and wanted some formal education on management and finances. About this, she remembers: “I only applied to The Lisbon MBA, because I knew it was the one program I wanted to make. I basically followed my parents’ advice, my friends’ recommendation and looked into the rankings.”

During her MBA, she would work all week as a medical doctor in Algarve and on Friday she would drive to Lisbon to have classes until 10 pm. The worst year was the first, as she would have classes after a 24-hour shift. After that, when her shift was reduced to just 12 hours, she remembers being a lot more pro-active. And again, the main thing she received from this MBA program was the “amazing people” she met. One of them, a professor, actually invited her to join his project’s team, Patient Innovation, a nonprofit, international venue for patients and caregivers of any disease to share their innovations.

Right now, this entrepreneur already has many projects to look for. She is preparing a new venture of her own . This will reunite many of her passions, shoe design, health & medicine and technology. She was also accepted for a Harvard grant under the 2017 Portugal Clinical Scholars Research Training (PTCSRT) Certificate Program to gain further in the methods and conduct of clinical research. Patrizia was also invited to join the Health Parliament, a global initiative to boost the discussing in depth and coming up with solutions for the Portuguese health system. In this group, she’s trying to come up with ways to increase the digital literacy amongst caregivers.

How about her job as a doctor, will she be able to leave it? Patrizia smiles when she talks about it: “I love my patients and I will never be able to leave them!” In fact, this is what medicine means to her, “to build a relationship with the patient, and make him more responsible about his condition. To make him want to help himself.” And that is why she only sleeps around 4 hours a night, to make more time for the people in her life.

 

Profile (questions):

Book: It depends on the mood, but I would highlight “The Prince” by Nicolo Machiavelli and “A estrada do esquecimento e outros contos” by Fernando Pessoa

Movie: “Cinema Paradiso” de Giuseppe Tornatore

Music: “Tema de Lara” Dr Jivago; “Desfado” Ana Moura; “With my own two hands” Ben Harper

Motto: ”The meaning of life is that it stops.”, Kafka

“The others are the mirror of your actions, act so that you like what you see”, Maria Saudade