The rector of the Universitat Politècnica de Catalunya (UPC), Daniel Crespo, and his management team will present to the campus educational community this month an innovative project for a technological campus, offering health studies. Specifically, the board of directors has called the governing council meeting on April 24 to explain the proposal to promote a medical degree in the near future. If they obtain the green light from the educational community (teaching and research staff, administration and services, and students must vote for it) they would begin to design the curriculum.
The project is just an incipient idea, a degree limited to 50 places, with a training characterized by its high content in technological and digital subjects, which would have the eventual collaboration of the Consorci Sanitari de Terrassa. It is worth remembering that the university is polytechnic in nature, with prestigious engineering schools, although it also has, precisely on its Terrassa campus, the faculty of optics and optometry.
The UPC would like to start the first year of medical students in the 2026-2027 academic year. However, if the project is approved on April 24, it would have a tortuous administrative journey as it must obtain not only the approval of the quality agency for university studies (AQU) but also the agreement of the Consell Interuniversitari de Catalunya (CIC). in which all Catalan universities and the Conselleria d'Universitats participate. Finally, it should have the authorization of the Council of Universities of Madrid on which the Ministries of Universities and Health depend. This is because this degree is linked to certain positions for internal residency physicians (MIR).
Some of the Catalan universities that already offer these degrees, when asked by this newspaper, are skeptical about the expansion of this offer, taking into account the needs of doctors in the future and the typology of the studies of health professionals, in which addresses the skills of caring for the person. Likewise, without knowing in advance the characteristics of the project promoted by Rector Crespo, they consider that collaboration between existing faculties of medicine with those of engineering or data science studies would be more positive.
If this faculty is created, it would be the tenth that offers medicine in Catalonia. The others are UB Clínic, UB Bellvitge, UAB, UPF, UdG, UdL and URV, in addition to the UVic-UCC, the last one that opened its faculty with a special economic regime, and the International University of Catalonia (UIC).
In addition to the UPC, there are two private universities that have shown interest in offering this same degree, which is highly sought after among students and which generally requires a high cut-off grade to enter. These are the Abat Oliba CEU University and the Ramon Llull University, from Blanquerna.
The San Pablo CEU Foundation, owner of the Abat Oliba, created the faculty of health and life sciences in Barcelona this same year, based on existing psychology studies and a master's degree in dentistry, which are in the branch sanitary. It wants to offer, in addition to medicine, nursing and physiology. The demand to teach these studies is already on the table of the CIC but the initial forecast to teach this degree has been postponed to September 2026 or 2027. On the other hand, nursing could open it in 2025.
For its part, Blanquerna plans to open an offer for 80 students and the expected start course would be 2026/27. Sources from this university pointed out that the new Blanquerna-URL degree in Medicine wants to “train professionals to practice High Tech, High Touch medicine, a humanly scientific and scientifically human medicine.”
In this 2023-2024 academic year, the Catalan university system expanded the places by 12% compared to the previous year, adding 146 more places. In total, 1,340 first-year places have been offered, of which 1,100 are from public universities and 230 from the Universitat de Vic-Central de Catalunya and the UIC.
