The University of Barcelona (UB) has announced that the School of Nursing will leave the macro-faculty of Medicine and Health Sciences and will become a faculty with full rights. In this way, according to a statement from the university center, it contributes "decisively to the visibility and recognition" of the profession.
This was one of the old demands of the UB nurses since their school merged with those of Medicine, Dentistry and Podiatry to form the Faculty of Medicine and Health Sciences. The merger of departments and faculties at the UB occurred in 2015 when the UB reformed its academic structures, leaving the 106 departments and 18 faculties in half with the aim of achieving "more agile and modern" management. Then, they were grouped under the same Faculty of Education, those of Pedagogy and Teacher Training. A Science and Engineering area for Physics, Geology, Mathematics and Chemistry was also created.
The nurses criticized the loss of autonomy and representation of their profession by being part of a faculty that includes Medicine, an entity with great training and research power (it is 45th in the world according to the Shanghai ranking). And they claimed a faculty of their own.
For the rector of the UB, Joan Guàrdia, the creation of this faculty corrects a "historical debt" with the profession. "The benefits will be evident, in obtaining resources, improving international competitiveness and optimizing the student care service," he says in the note. "But above all we put nursing at the level it deserves, as one of the key areas of health and care for people."
The faculty, which will shortly open the call to elect the head, the dean, will have a volume of 2,700 students and 369 members between teaching and research staff and 150 members of the administration and services staff. Currently, the director of the school is Joan Mª Estrada.
It will teach the Nursing degree, three university master's degrees -Advanced Clinical Practice Nursing; Leadership and management of nursing services; and Research Methodology applied to nursing care- and 14 own master's and postgraduate courses.
According to the UB, the new center will train the "greatest number" of nursing professionals in Catalonia -currently 20% of the staff graduate from the UB- and will respond to the demands of a sector in which 40% of professionals over 50 years of age.
The students will continue their practical training in the five university hospitals of the UB -Hospital Clínic, Hospital de Bellvitge, Complex Hospitalari Moisès Broggi, Hospital Mútua Terrassa and Hospital Sant Joan de Déu-, the 11 hospitals and associated centers, the 7 socio-health centers and the 51 primary care centers.
The UB offers 530 new places annually in the Nursing degree, a figure that represents 37% of the places offered by the Faculty of Medicine and Health Sciences.
According to the latest pre-registration data, 31.5% of the total number of students who wanted to take a degree in Nursing in Catalonia applied to the UB School of Nursing. In the 2022-2023 academic year, teaching has had 7 teaching groups, with a total of 530 students per course, out of the 2,825 places to study the nursing degree in the entire Catalan university system.
