The pandemic had to turn our values ??upside down. make memory There were many stories that gained prominence and were used to explain fundamental social changes. One of them was the rediscovery of the virtues of life in small towns and villages far from large metropolitan environments. Dozens of stories were published announcing an urban exodus that would be unstoppable and had already begun. At last, we were told, we were rediscovering life on a human scale. The vital bet would be to take root in places that are less stressful, less polluted, more economical, with less rush and where each individual is someone and taken into account.
Tick-tock, tick-tock. After a while the media took it upon themselves to put an end to an episode of rural fever that had never even existed. Things were back to where they were before. We heard from some witnesses who called the end of the adventure to return to where they always were. We had told each other a beautiful story. A blah, blah, blah as poignant as it is quantitatively insignificant.
All this comes at the expense of the internal resident doctor positions (MIR) that the Ministry of Health has awarded this week. Pending the competition, almost a quarter of the places in the specialty of family medicine have not been filled. The desert of applicants leaves, for the moment, a total of 459 places unfilled, 98 in Catalonia (all of them outside of Barcelona).
Forgive the medical professionals the audacity. But, with no intention of judging anyone, it says something about our society and the priorities of our students that the places that sell out every year in a nanosecond are those in dermatology and plastic surgery and that, instead, the main link of a society that wants to be healthy, family medicine, stay to dress saints. Being a family doctor is not cool. not enough And wandering around the primary care centers in areas far from the big cities either. Houston, we have a problem!
Those who have been conscientiously studying the lack of vocations for some time attribute it to multisectoral factors. And they agree in pointing out that one of the problems is the profile of the medical student who accesses universities only through an extremely Darwinian process of excellent grades. Medical schools capture the elite of academic records. But they eliminate from the equation less competitive profiles that would be equally great medical professionals due to human capacity and vocation. Young people less seduced by technology, last-minute scientific innovation or medicine of other complexity, but closer to the ancestral foundations of the profession, giving as a result characters more conducive to the practice of the specialty of family medicine.
We are not dealing with a Catalan or Spanish problem. In the countries around us, there are also similar problems exacerbated by the socio-demographic crisis. The general practitioner, and especially the one practicing in rural areas, does not come with glamour. Much will have to do with the fall of its prestige, in our case, the unstoppable bureaucratization of primary care, which has turned its doctors into diligent administrators with a very limited scope for self-organization and innovation. Who wants to become a bureaucrat after studying medicine? Well, much less than we need and will need.
But beyond the questions that refer to the medical profession and the way it is organized, we can guess a fundamental problem that also has a relationship with the values ??that accompany us as a society. It goes beyond doctors and is widespread in many other professions. It has to do with the willingness to put down roots in places where the professional career is more limited by present standards than what we mean by success. Places where, in the case of the doctor, this is essential, more than for anything else, for the support he can give to people in the different cycles of their lives and for his long-term commitment to a specific community and known
Governments and professionals will have to hurry to remedy everything they have in the way of incentives and whatever decisions they consider can help alleviate this drought of vocations that has been going on for years. Knowing, however, that there are elements that respond only to the sign of the times and our collective way of life. The one that the pandemic had to change. do you remember