The nurse with the best grade has a 5.7 out of 10: "It is impossible for it to be a fair exam"

Beatriz Díez Mas has obtained the best grade in Spain in the Resident Intern Nurse (EIR) test, out of almost 7,000 candidates, and she has done so with a score that would be equivalent to 5.7 out of 10, something that she considers evidence of that the exam, as students complain, is not fair.

“No one thought it was fair. The questions were outside the established syllabus. If you calculate out of 10, my grade is a 5.7. If number 1 has less than six, it is impossible for it to be a fair exam. We were almost 7,000 people, and many people have prepared a lot like me. Something similar has also happened in other years,” says the Zamora nurse from Valencia, where she lives and will do her residency as a midwife.

Díez Mas (Morales del Vino, 1989), decided to apply for the EIR at a time when he had come to consider leaving nursing, a profession that he likes, but in which years of job instability and, above all, have taken their toll. the hard time of the pandemic.

“I like nursing, but when things work well. That’s why I prepared for it for nine months, I was clear that I was going to do my best, I studied full time and every day for the last few months. I didn’t expect to come first but I studied to finish among the first 100, I didn’t show up to see what would happen,” he admits.

The nurse from Zamora, graduated in 2010 from the University of Salamanca, had two clear objectives: to finally achieve job stability in public health and in the same specialty, and to be able to stay in Valencia, which is the place she has chosen to live.

“Now I have all the specialties and all the hospitals to choose from. At first I wasn’t sure, but in the end I decided on midwife, because of the content of the specialty, which has to be very nice, and also because it is the only one which only nurses with that training can access,” he explains.

When she finished her degree in 2010, the EIR already existed, but she did not find it interesting because it is not essential to work as a nurse. However, after more than a decade in the profession, she has chosen this path to achieve stability and specialization.

“In nursing there is always work, but having a specialty guarantees you get out of that circle of having to know a little of everything and a lot of nothing. At least it gives you a little thematic stability, because job stability in nursing is difficult since you need years of experience,” he warns.

Beatriz Díez Mas left the faculty in the middle of the 2010 crisis, when “there was very little work, because there were fewer replacements,” so she dedicated herself to chaining contracts in private senior residences throughout Spain. “What I wanted was to work,” she says.

“The other options were to stay in Zamora and work only in the summers as a nurse and spend the rest of the year with what I earned during those months or look for a residence, or opt for a private one in Madrid or Barcelona, ??but with no guarantee of working all year round, only summers, Christmas, Easter, and the rest of the year waiting for them to call you,” he says.

She took another path, going wherever they gave her a contract, so she always worked but without stopping packing her bags: Haro (La Rioja), A Coruña, Barcelona and, in 2014, Malta, where they offered a good contract and where she met her current couple among Spanish nurses.

When they decided to return to Spain, they were first in Tenerife, where they experienced the pandemic, and then they settled in Valencia, where they do not want to leave. He has become accustomed to living near the sea, although he continues to go to his native Zamora whenever he can to visit.