The medical specialty with the greatest shortage of professionals, family and community medicine, registered 202 vacancies in Spain in the last allocation of places for access to specialized health training. In Catalonia, between vacancies and resignations, this year there are 56 fewer residents than expected.
Although it is essential, the figure of the family doctor is diluted between crowded agendas, guards, unattractive destinations or aggressive patients… In recent years, attempts to reactivate the specialty have had no effect, and the Administrations resort to the search of imaginative solutions. Like the Generalitat, which has commissioned a docuseries about the world of primary care centers (CAP) to praise the work of its professionals.
The idea is to broadcast a series similar to Veterinaris, which achieved good ratings on TV3 for several seasons, but with family doctors instead of pet doctors. “It is about valuing the work of social and community medicine with real cases and not fiction, in order to increase the social prestige of professionals,” argued the Health Minister, Manel Balcells. “We all have the idea of ??the family doctor, the house doctor, the one who solved things and had great social prestige,” he continued, with the idea of ??restoring the reputation of this profession and stopping the growing flight towards better valued specialties.
After evaluating eight proposals, the Catalan Corporation of Mitjans Audiovisuals selected the candidacy of Incís Films ( Ments inquietes , Entre vinyes , L’ofici de viure , etc.) at the end of April, with a budget of 369,203 euros. According to Salut sources, in recent months filming has taken place in different parts of Catalonia with teams carrying out primary care tasks in clinics, on home visits or giving workshops on health to young people. “It is about bringing the profession closer to citizens, so that people know the work that is carried out in their CAP,” they explain. The series aims to reflect the territorial diversity and the diversity of primary school patients, through real professionals, real situations and real patients who have authorized filming. Apparently there is no release date and the title has not yet been awarded. Metges, in the vein of Veterinaris, is considered excessively generic and Metges de família evokes Family Doctor, the successful 119-episode series starring Emilio Aragón between 1995 and 1999.
Are we facing a promising instrument or a mere idea? According to Metges de Catalunya, it is not poorly thought out: “It is an initiative that can work, but we would like the reality of family medicine to be reflected and not just a sugarcoated vision. That is to say, we also see the hardness, the overload, the limited time for each patient, the shortage of doctors to meet the demand for care, etc. In the opinion of the union, if the docuseries is not limited to doctors and is extended to the rest of primary care professionals, it will lose effectiveness in its task of promoting the specialty.
For Sònia Miravet, vice-secretary of the Official College of Metges of Barcelona, ??any initiative in line with prestige of primary care and family and community medicine is always positive. “Valuing the principles of the specialty can go well, but (in the docuseries) there must be a balance between the romantic ideal vision of primary school and the needs we have,” she says. On the other hand, he understands that social networks can be a more effective means of recruiting future GPs than television.
