The MIR 2023 election closes with a bitter result for Family and Community Medicine: 131 vacancies have remained of the 202 that remained after the first appeal. Despite having 2,445 voters available for this second round, only 80 have been interested in any of the available vacancies and, in the end, only 71 places have been awarded, just over 35% of those available.
The 131 empty spaces are divided between Aragon (15), Asturias (1), Cantabria (4), Castilla y León (40), Catalonia (8), Extremadura (16), Galicia (33) and Navarra (14). Only La Rioja has managed to cover in this extraordinary turn the 2 places that had run out of R1. In total, 5.3% of the 2,455 places offered have remained free.
Family, worse than last year
The 2022 MIR allocation ended with four specialties not covered (Occupational Medicine, Preventive Medicine and Public Health, Microbiology and Parasitology, and Family and Community Medicine) during the ordinary appeal, which was then expected to be the only one.
In the case of Family Medicine, the MIR 2022 election closed with 93 vacancies, 83 less than this year. Microbiology was left with 2, Preventive Medicine with 8 and Occupational Medicine also with 8 uncovered in the first round, but later they were elected by non-EU citizens who were able to participate in the second call that was improvised weeks after the election closed.
This has been the second round MIR 2023
The last voter who has opted for Family is number 10,769, who will be formed in the Don Benito-Villanueva de la Serena health area.
There are 24 applicants summoned in this session belonging to the disability quota, 2 of them process their application. There are 453 applicants summoned belonging to the non-EU quota, 41 of them are processing a place request. An appeal presented by the applicant with order number 7,093, who chooses order number 6,746, was considered. This person has processed a request for a position in this session.
In total, 8,347 places have been awarded, 4.7% more than last year, with 7,970, due to the effort of the Ministry of Health in increasing places, as indicated to this medium, without ruling on the situation for the moment of Family Medicine.
Reactions from professionals
The member of the Young Doctors of the OMC, Domingo Sánchez, considers that “we are facing a critical situation in the Specialized Health Training model and in access to it”. For this reason, he wonders “what plans does the ministry have to mitigate or work on it”
He assures that from the Council they have sent more than a dozen proposals and that they are “open to work and try to see how we can help because we are in a critical situation and it can put the availability of future specialists for the health system at risk”..
“Here we have shown, not only that we know the reality and we have worked on it by sending these proposals, but also that we are once again fully available because we are very concerned about what may happen in the future.”
Sheila Justo, MIR member of CESM, interprets that, in practice, thanks to the “play-off” of candidates (since the rest are part of the disability and non-EU quotas), 28 places have been covered, because otherwise ” there would have been 159 empty spaces”. “They are unrecoverable MIR positions and what they reflect is the failure of the system.”
“The fact that the assignment is not in real time makes the choice difficult, especially in Family Medicine, because you cannot know the order in which you are when you choose the teaching unit”. And it is that it is not the same to be the first than to be the last, because you cannot choose the health center or the hospital through which you would like to rotate.
“If they do not implement urgent measures for the provision of primary care doctors in health policies both at the central and regional levels, the system is not sustainable. It's that raw,” he says.
It also regrets that they have information from communities that hire non-specialist doctors, which may be causing voters to discard it, for which reason it calls for control measures. “Communities should not lower the training requirements of professionals, that violates the safety and quality of the system”.
Justo also requests that the agreed measures be implemented in the different communities to improve the conditions of practice for primary care physicians, such as limiting schedules, among other reasons to improve the quality of care.