2023-05-15 15:21:35
Frustration, annoyance and sadness are the feelings that accompany the many extra-community doctors who reside in Spain and who cannot practice their profession despite having applied for the homologation of their titles years ago, without response, and with the indignation at the claim of the lack of doctors in the country: “we are doctors and they don’t let us work”.
Discomfort before the slow homologation of their titles increaseIn addition, seeing that many other doctors are seeing this procedure resolved despite having requested it a few months ago thanks to the nuevo approval decree and validation of degrees in Medicine, Nursing and other health training. “There are people who have been waiting two years for the old decree and now, following the approval of the new one, some people already have their approval following three months.”
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Mariana: “It’s as if you’re in a queue and your number is 300 out of 1,000 and, suddenly, a window opens and the queue starts from back to front” |
Mariana He is from Argentina, but he has lived in Barcelona for a year. She is a pediatrician and specialist in neonatology, and has 15 years of experience behind their backs. She began with the formalization to homologate her title in December 2021 and the following year he decided to settle in Spain. “Since the law stated that the approval procedures were resolved in six months, I settled in May. When I arrived, I got in touch with other foreign doctors who were in the same situation as me and there we got the great surprise of the delay with the approvals.
Mariana explains that at that time she began to send emails to the different institutions to check the status of this issue. “The responses were awful. they just told us we had to waitThey were very late.”
The discomfort of all these professionals increase with the arrival of the new Decree of homologation of Medicine titles in Novemberwho was chasing simplify these procedures. And it is not that the incorporation of this new measure did not work, that it did; It is that it worked, but it left behind thousands of professionals who had been waiting years for their approval and expedited the resolution of those procedures opened from that date.
“We are seeing how the requests of the new decree are coming out, and those of the old one, that we have been like this for years, We still waitingMariana explains. “These things cause great discomfort, the logical thing to do would be to overtake those of us who have been there for so long.”
The slowness in the procedures have forced her to look for Another job and has worked as a telephone operator for five months and has even come to consider travel to others countries like France or Germany with the idea of practicing as a doctor without much delay.
“I haven’t practiced for a year and seven months,” he explains. “Medicine for a doctor is his life, it is my vocationI miss my colleagues, being active makes me feel useful, might be saving lives and I feel that my hands are tied.”
“Thirty years of experience stored in a jar”
ruben He is a specialist in General Surgery and Occupational Medicine, a career that he has been practicing since 1989 and that has been forced to pause for the same reason as Mariana. Like her, he is Argentine and came to Spain in October 2021following having begun the approval procedures in April of that same year.
“I was a prestigious surgeon, with a career of more than 30 years a lot of work, but one day you have to exchange that quantity for quality, especially for life”, says Rubén.
He currently works in a clinic as adviser while waiting for the homologation of his degree to be able to practice. For him, the surprise also came when the last decree was approved and that allowed people who presented their papers in November to resolve this process. “Then we found that the people who had been waiting for two years did not have no solution Not any kind of response.”
“We feel like the last ones,” he says. “Spain does not have to train us, we are just waiting to start working,” claims Rubén. “When you listen and read on all sides the serious problems that Spain has, that people wait a long time for a medical shift, and that there are guards without coverage, you do not understand that there is thousands of doctors what are they waiting for an official to deign to see his file”.
“You feel like they are taking you in jokeand no, it is not that there is a lack of doctors, it is that yes There are doctors and they do not authorize us to work”, declares Ruben.
“How can it be that there are a lack of doctors and I can’t work?”
And Laura He is in the same situation as Mariana and Rubén. His process is underway more than two years and in March he traveled to Madrid with the hope of being able to fix it in person. “I went, I had a meeting, they told me they would respond to me in 15 business days and I still haven’t received anything.”
With a career of six years As a gynecologist and obstetrician in Argentina, Ana Laura decided to emigrate to Spain in search of a better quality of life that resists among bureaucratic plots that seem not to advance. “It is a process too slowIf there is a claim, they will ask me for things that are already expired and then they will reject it because I haven’t practiced for years, when the reality is that I don’t because they do not allow me”.
“There is a lot of work and doctors neededand here we are many of us who cannot work”, he explains, something that causes him “a lot of anguish”: “I am available and without the homologation they do not accept an interview, in turn this does not allow me to have rental contracts and thus a chain of things.
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Ana Laura: “I’m trying to work in anything: business, hospitality; but I’m not a waitress, I don’t know how to be a waitress, I’m a doctor” |
For her, the most “unfair” thing is that “previous requests” are being resolved and, like her colleagues, she does not understand that those who have been “waiting for years” do not get a response from the institutions.
They are advice for other non-EU doctors who plan to live in Spain is that they start the procedures as soon as possible, that they do so “as soon as they have the title, even if they don’t know if they are going to come”, since the process is “so slow” that, if they make that decision in the future, Hopefully, your file will be resolved by now.
Mariana, Rubén and Ana Laura are three names of a long list of doctors who reside in Spain and who have been waiting for the resolution of their titles for years in a system that has forgotten and that, far from appreciating what they can contribute to healthcare, they have done nothing more than put bureaucratic obstacles in their way.
Although it may contain statements, data or notes from health institutions or professionals, the information contained in Redacción Médica is edited and prepared by journalists. We recommend to the reader that any health-related questions be consulted with a health professional.
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