Since 2011, more than 35,000 doctors have applied to the Medical Collegiate Organization (OMC) for Certificate of validity to leave Spain. Specifically, in 2021, a total of 2,504 doctors applied to the WTO for certification, more than 2,189 from last year and more than 2,500 for 2019. These are the data provided by the Andalusian Medical Federation in a work prepared by Vicente Matas on 6,478 medical professionals will finish MIR this year And for those who now have “time to look for work, with an average age of 29-30 years and after 10-11 years of training”.
And although among those 35,000 graduates who applied for a certificate of fitness, “there are fewer who finally emigrate,” the final figure, according to medical sources, is no less than 20,000. “cWe create talents and train the best medical specialists From the world, they are “pulled” out of Spain, only to be “expelled” later due to instability and instability. Meanwhile, in Spain, “waiting lists are growing and health service doctors are saturated and have unbearable workloads.”
According to the aforementioned SMA report, “It is now fair to offer our health services,” to these 6,478 medical professionals, “Stability with long-term contracts and better working and professional conditions to strengthen and rejuvenate the cadre of doctors exhausted by this long epidemic, the centers and most of all the citizens will benefit.” Most requests for a certificate of eligibility to leave Spain, 64% for work-related reasons. Family medicine, anesthesiology and paediatrics are the specialties with the highest number of applications and the main destination countries are UK, France, Ireland, Italy and Germany
That is, “unfortunately”, if “this effort is not made, at least to provide stability and better conditions, the offers in other countries in our environment, which are more attractive, will cause, once again, that many newly trained medical specialists are left to work.” This is the case of Fernando, a Canarian doctor of about 45 years who has been working since 2014 at a French hospital in Toulouse. “In France, I earn three times as much as I earn in SpainBut above all, what I value most is the stability and working conditions. He had no life in Spain. Days that end at 10:00 PM and start the next day at 8:00 AM. So day by day. You were not paid for this slavery that you suffered. In addition, I believed, and still believe, that there was no future for doctors in Spain, that we were not appreciated.”
Fernando, from France, also influences a vital point and that means that in successive years, “we’re already doing it,” says Vicente Matas, SNS I miss all these medical professionalsalso nurses and nurseswho emigrated. “Roughly 40% of health service blocks,” according to various reports, “will be vacant due to retirement in the next 10 or 11 years.” For this reason, medical professionals warn that “we need responsible planning of the needs of specialist clinicians, and so we hope that the recent increases in MIR jobs will be sufficient and that when they are finished they will not migrate in large numbers to neighboring countries with the best conditions.” According to a survey of doctors with more than 10 years of experience in the scientific publication Medscape, doctors in France earn, on average, 95,000 euros annually; Spanish 53,000 euros; While German doctors receive 125,000 and in the UK the best paid in Europe is 130,000.
The most recent data available to the General Council of Official Colleges of Physicians (CGCOM) indicates this. In Spain, 41% of active physicians are over 55 years old A 9.1% are still active over 65 years of age. In absolute numbers, this means that there are more than 20,000 doctors over 65 Active and 70,000 are in the 55- to 65-year-old range. In order to maintain the SNS (National Health System) with the same number of specialists now, it will be “necessary to integrate an average of 9,000 specialists annually” over the next decade. This year there will be, at most, 6,478.
According to the University Medical Organization and the Ministry of Health itself, medical specialties are the highest shortage of professionals, with a replacement rate well below one, family medicine, pediatrics, general surgery, otolaryngology, preventive medicine, orthopedics and traumatology. “This has been known to happen for years because of Our SNS “lives” from the large number of doctors who joined the system in the 1980s. But no one planned, and it might be too late. We will obviously have a problem with the number of medical professionals in the coming years, Vicente Matas explains to La Información. According to the latest available data, the number of registered doctors in Spain is 267,995, of whom 227,817 are active, and of these, 158,191, according to the Ministry of Health, to the SNS.
From a study conducted by the World Trade Organization three years ago, it can be concluded that when the number of retired physicians was about 4,000 per year, a decade ago, more than 6,000 physicians completed specialized training annually and Many of them were unable to find work and remained unemployed Throughout the year to work two months in the summer. However, when the number of retirees began to increase in recent years, They ended up being less specialists than doctorsAs a result of significant cuts in vacancies held in 2011 and the following years, which completed her training in 2015 and the following years. In short, there is an absolute lack of coordination, to which is added the migration of many of our doctors to countries that offer them better conditions and functional stability.”
Therefore, “there is a shortage of doctors of various specialties and There are a lot of graduates in medicine who did not have access to MIR training.” That is, the increase in the number of colleges has put us in the first places in the world with 44 medical schools that will train, according to data from the Ministry of Education, “more than 7,500 students annually, and they are not. MIR training content.
Gabriel del Pozo is the General Secretary of the State Confederation of Medical Unions (CESM). “All this,” and the shortage of doctors in a few years due to the high levels of retirement for those in the profession now, “is something that has been seen to come, but The administration did not carry out any planning. What comes to us is problematic, again, because of the lack of insight of our political leaders, both at the national level and at the regional level. And now we’ll go as usual, trying to put patches to solve an already known issue and we’ll solve it either way and maybe not in the best way.
According to data from the National Health System, there are currently 686,000 health professionals, compared to 660,000 last year. Of these, 158,000 are physicians (most, 85,000, belong to hospital care and 43,000 to primary care). In addition, there are 198,000 nurses (154,000 of hospital care). But apparently, neither health spending nor staffing will be enough to relieve the country’s need. serious problem.
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