Closed quota in medicine: public universities will offer 706 additional places in the degree | education

The government has allocated €52 million from the general state budget for 2023 with the aim of improving medical degree teaching and creating around 750 first-year places in 35 public colleges. But finally there will be a little less, and 706 new jobs will be opened because universities, which processed their applications through regional governments mediated by the Branch Ministry, have not exhausted the additional quota, according to the data to which they had access. This magazine. This is nothing unusual, colleges often can’t offer everything…

The government has allocated €52 million from the general state budget for 2023 with the aim of improving medical degree teaching and creating around 750 first-year places in 35 public colleges. But finally there will be a little less, and 706 new jobs will be opened because universities, which processed their applications through regional governments mediated by the Branch Ministry, have not exhausted the additional quota, according to the data to which they had access. This magazine. And this is nothing unusual, colleges often cannot offer everything they can: teaching this degree is very expensive, the largest after veterinary medicine, and requires a lot of resources. In this academic year 2022-2023, for example, 5,904 places were made available in the first year of medicine, even though the universities are authorized to teach up to 6,106 students.

Now these places will grow by 706. Of these, 558 places have been newly created, which is 8.6% more than has been allowed so far. The government’s obligation is to invest €15,000 in each of these jobs annually – the money can be used to hire staff – and during the six years that the degree lasts, until three promotions come out. The other 148 are unpublished, but provided in Degree Verification Reports (technical reports that prove the degree can be taught), but have not been submitted; In these cases, the universities had to exhaust them in order to order the opening of new ones.

the Medicine Deans Conference She was reluctant to take in more students. Its president, Mayor of Malaga Pablo Lara, recalls how the Ministry of Health proposed to increase the number of students by 10% last year, and they resisted it. They did this because of the increase that had already occurred in the number of students enrolled – the number of students had increased by 74% in ten years – and because of the lack of material and professional means. But the new proposal from the health departments and universities, given a million-dollar game, led them to reach an agreement.

Andalusia, for example, will receive 11 million euros, which will increase its places in the first year by 155. “This extraordinary funding is, without a doubt, an opportunity for the colleges to improve their infrastructure. And we asked to use an important part of the funding to hire teachers,” says Lara, satisfied. He appreciates “our assessment is positive, because we have not had such significant funding for any college project in recent years,” but remembers that it is “one-off funding” and that it should continue to improve teaching and practice.

he Report on the supply and need for medical professionals 2021-2035, published by the Ministry of Health in 2022, shows that there is a shortage of physicians with expertise in family medicine, anesthesiology, geriatrics, psychiatry, and radiological diagnostics; And the calculation of a shortage of 9,000 medical professionals by 2027. A shortage that they expect to occur even with the numbers of recent years, as the number of graduates in medicine has not stopped increasing due to the promotion of private universities, which they charge to 20,000 euros per course. In 15 years, it has gone from 28 colleges (26 public and two private) to 46 colleges (35 public and 11 private), and next year, if nothing goes wrong, the first of four more colleges will open.

The pressure from families to offer more places in medicine is enormous and both deans and regional governments are aware of the keen interest. In the 2022-2023 academic year, according to data provided by the Knowledge and Development Foundation, there were 13.1 applicants for each of the places on offer. Essential work for physicians during the pandemic has also been crucial, as pre-registrations with medicine as first choice have increased by 73.1% since the 2019/2020 academic year (adv).

Thus, the public cannot absorb all the demand and it is the private sector that ends up acquiring the students. The largest commitment to medicine occurs in the hands of private colleges in Madrid, where four public colleges enrolled 5,000 students last year in their six-year careers, compared to 3,700 in four private centres. And next year will be another one. Camilo José Cela University will include the prized degree – it attracts the best students and the biggest funds for research – in its course catalog which comes with 80 places (the idea is to get to 200). At the moment, the gap with the public is not narrowing as expected. Compared to those only 80 places in Camilo José Cela, only 75 new places to open are distributed between Complutense, Alcala, Rey Juan Carlos and Otunuma. Mayors-Generals have lamented in recent years the regional government’s support of the private sector, which has led to problems in the practice of practices in public hospitals.

By autonomy, the numbers are differentiated. Valencian society, which in times of PP government tended to expand places in the private sector, is experiencing moments of great tension because the Miguel Hernandez University of Elche has lodged an appeal to prevent the neighboring University of Alicante from opening the next one. General special degree in medicine. Despite this climate, the four public colleges will moderately increase their newly created quotas (28 places plus 86 in Alicante), in contrast to Castilla y León, the subject of discussion for each selective ‘they regret that the places are occupied by students from other communities’ which She applied to all the places she could. In Salamanca and Valladolid, the cap of 15% of new places set by the government has been exhausted without adjusting the address verification report. The Universities of Extremadura and Santiago also took up an additional 15% of the jobs.

In the Balearic Islands, there will be nine more, the University of the Basque Country will have an additional 37, and Murcia will expand 20. The Public University of Navarre hesitated to ask for new places because the degree was created recently and they plan to open a new building in 2025, but they will finally have 10 more . Sometimes space prevents more medicine groups from opening, as well as a lack of means to do internships and a huge shortage of doctors certified to be full professors or professors; An alarming deficit that will worsen in the short term – half of them will retire in five years without rest – and that the Ministry of Universities and the state agency Aneca are trying to solve with a special measure for health teachers, which takes into account not so much teaching and scientific merit as the practice of their profession and the transmission of knowledge.

In Andalusia, the private University of Loyola (Seville) and Jane (69 places) opened the next year a medical degree. Almeria started this year and, together with the universities of Córdoba, Seville, Granada, Cadiz and Malaga, will add another 146 places to its offering, compared to 15 in Oviedo and 16 in Castilla-La Mancha. Particularly striking is the case of the University of Seville, which has gone from not exhausting its 320 authorized places, to housing an additional 64 students in first-year classes this coming September.

In Catalonia, another 126 places have been added to the medicine catalog of the six public universities. While you are in the Canary Islands, a new degree in medicine is also being opened in the private sector, Fernando de Pessoa University, and in this scenario the University of La Laguna will not get another place. The parsonage says the quota has not been increased due to a lack of funding for new faculty.

According to a study by Deans, Spain has 14.5 medical graduates per 100,000 inhabitants, which is above the average of the OECD (13.1), Italy (13.3), the United Kingdom (12.9), Germany (12.0) and France (9.5). After this increase in first-year students, Health will be forced to increase the number of MIR (internist-in-residence) positions, because the degree is useless if they do not study the specialty later. This MIR call was the most generous in history: 8,550 places.

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