The pandemic was going to turn our values upside down. Make memory. There were many stories that gained great prominence and were used to explain underlying social changes. One was the rediscovery of the virtues of life in small cities and towns far from large metropolitan environments. Dozens of reports 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 less stressful, less polluted, cheaper places, with less rush and in which each individual is someone and taken into account.
Tick-tock, tick-tock. Time passed and the media took it upon themselves to end the episode of rural fever that had not even existed. Things were back where they were before. We learned of some testimonies that ended their adventure to return to where they always were. We had told each other a nice story. A blah, blah, blah as moving as it is quantitatively insignificant.
All this comes on account of the positions for resident internal medicine doctors (MIR) that the Ministry of Health has awarded this week. Pending the playoffs, almost a quarter of the places in the family medicine specialty have not been filled. The wasteland of applicants leaves, for the moment, a total of 459 places unfilled, 98 in Catalonia (all of them outside Barcelona).
Forgive medical professionals for the audacity. But without trying to judge anyone, it says something about our society and the priorities of our students that the places that fill up every year in a millisecond are those in dermatology and plastic surgery and that, on the other hand, the main link in a society If you want to be healthy, family medicine is left to dress saints. Being a family doctor is not cool. Not enough. Nor is there a pilgrimage to primary care centers in areas far from cities. Houston, we have a problem!
Those who have been thoroughly studying this wasteland of vocations attribute it to multisectoral factors. And they agree 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 academic record elite.
But they eliminate less competitive profiles from the equation, who would be equally great medical professionals due to their human capacity and vocation. Young people less seduced by technology, scientific innovation or highly complex medicine, but who would be closer to the ancestral foundations of the profession, resulting in characters more conducive to the practice of the specialty of family medicine.
We are not facing a Catalan or Spanish problem. Similar problems aggravated by the sociodemographic crisis also occur in our surrounding countries. The general practitioner, and especially one who practices in rural territories, is not glamorous. In our case, the unstoppable bureaucratization of primary care will have a lot to do with the fall of its prestige, which has turned its doctors into diligent administrative workers with a limited margin for self-organization and innovation. Who wants to become a bureaucrat having studied medicine? Well, less than we need and will need.
But beyond the issues that concern the medical profession and its way of organizing, there is an underlying problem that is also related to the values that accompany us as a society. It goes beyond doctors and is general in other professions. It has to do with the willingness to take root in places where the professional career is more limited by the present standards of what we understand by success. Places where, in the case of the doctor, it is essential, more than for anything else, for the accompaniment of people in their different life cycles and for their long-term commitment to a specific and well-known community.
Governments and professionals will have to work hard to remedy what has been fixed, through incentives and how many 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 living. The one that the pandemic was going to change. Do you remember?
