Almost 2,500 senior MIR doctors to ‘patch’ the lack of doctors in primary care this summer

Another summer with scarce, tight staff and with an MIR promotion that “will be used” to patch up those black holes on the health map of primary care centers. “In the summer we are going to have a coincidence of only 30% of the staff. This represents a significant healthcare challenge. We are heading towards oversaturation.” This is how José Polo, president of the Spanish Society of Primary Care Physicians (Semergen), emphasizes.

The situation is not new and is repeated every year. In January of this year, as EL MUNDO reported, the Collegiate Medical Organization (OMC) prepared an analysis in which it put on the table the peculiarity of vacation coverage this year. In addition to the already accused lack of doctors, it is added that the batch of MIRs would not be available until the month of September due to the delay caused by Covid.

With all these elements, Health and the communities met yesterday to hold a monographic Interterritorial Council, promoted by the PP regions, on this issue: finding solutions to avoid a summer without doctors and closures of primary care centers. And no agreement was reached. Two visions emerged from the appointment. On the one hand, Minister Mónica García summarized the event as “fruitful for those who came to work and not to campaign”; and on the other, the CCAA of the PP who showed their disappointment at the lack of a “clear agreement in the face of the doctor crisis that will occur this summer.”

The shortage of doctors is perceived more intensely in summer, especially in tourist areas, “because there is a high movement of patients, especially chronic patients, who return to their hometowns or simply go on vacation,” argues Polo. Since domestic tourism is also an economic source and records are expected to be broken this summer, taking destinations into account also helps in planning. Thus, in 2023, according to INE data, Andalusia, Catalonia and the Valencian Community were the main destinations. Last year the number of trips by residents to Spain increased by 10%, a volume of potential patients that is not insignificant.

Solutions that some CCAA proposed, and that García did not deny, put the MIR at the center. “They are not cheap labor to use in the summer,” claims the member of Young Doctors and Employment Promotion of the WTO, Domingo Sánchez, from the WTO. At the same time, he claims that “yesterday we should have put together 17 plans, because we already warned in January that this was going to happen.”

From the PP, its vice-secretary of Education and Health, Ester Muñoz, recalls that “it is already known that the Health powers are transferred to the Autonomous Communities, but the power of the MIR, to provide doctors, is one of the few that García has. “.

Of the more than 5,700 MIRs who finish their training this year and who will not be available to cover the summer needs of the health system, almost 2,500 correspond to Family Medicine and Pediatrics. Although not all of them are in primary care centers, the vast majority are. “This promotion began four months after its residency due to the pandemic and we already knew for four years that this moment would come,” says Sánchez, who regrets that everything “sounds cliché, but it is a chronicle of a death foretold.”

Polo manifests himself along the same lines. “In the end we find ourselves with summer recruitment marketing that only serves to steal doctors from the CCAA for a better economic offer.” In his opinion, neither this nor the MIR are a solution to a structural problem of a shortage of doctors “that has been known for years” and that “we face every day, although it is acute at this time.”

“The MIR are finishing their training and they do not have to be without a tutor in a position that is difficult to fill. Or have that tutor travel with them,” claims Polo, who assures that all of this is a strange “last minute” idea. .

PLANS THAT THE AUTONOMOUS COMMUNITIES HAVE IN MARCH

Galicia is one of the Autonomous Communities promoting the “MIR plan” to face the summer. Its Minister of Health, Antonio Gómez Caamaño, emphasizes that the autonomies have the responsibility “of planning and management” and that, in this way, while the communities prepare their plans for the summer “the Ministry does not say anything.”

“If the doctors’ pools in all the communities are empty, it is clear that the situation is frankly deficient and that is the situation that has been posed to the minister at the national level,” claims the Balearic counselor, Manuela García Romero.

For his part, the counselor of Castilla-La Mancha, Jesús Fernández Sanz, explained yesterday that, in the community, in response to the Ministry’s request for summer plans, “the region does not have a summer plan, but rather a continuous plan during all year round, for nine years now.

In that sense, Fernández Sanz explained that “we work so that the Plan responds to the contingencies that arise, such as the Christmas holidays, the processes that cause respiratory infections and we have been implementing and incorporating many measures that have emerged. due to different circumstances, such as the pandemic or the increase in retirements in Primary Care”.

From the Junta de Andalucía, the Ministry of Health points out that it is working on the Summer Plan, in which around 32,000 hires will be made. Castilla y León, for the moment, has not made public its intentions for the summer period.

They are joined by Murcia, which points to this medium that at the end of June they will report on the definitive contracts and plans. And they remember from the Ministry that “MIRs can be hired when they finish their training period: the Minister has not provided a solution and they end in September.”

Far from everyone is the Basque Country. As the Minister of Health, Gotzone Sagardui, stated yesterday morning, the minister’s only objective “was to hold the autonomous communities accountable for the planning of Primary Care services to cover summer services.” The Minister of Health maintains that the management of health care is “the exclusive responsibility of the Basque Government and that she does not have to report to the Ministry of Health.”

What is within the competence of the Ministry of Health, Sagardui recalled, “is to take extraordinary measures related to the MIR calls to fill primary care positions, or with the authorization of the training units of the autonomous communities to be able to train more doctors, or with the creation of the Urgency and Emergencies specialty, among others”. In her opinion, these proposals reiterated to successive health ministers in recent years remain unanswered.

From the Ministry of Health, García promised to find a solution to the MIR offer after the request of the communities in the autonomous plenary session. This will make it possible to clarify what the MIRs will be able to do this summer according to current regulations, although he believes that none of the autonomies will break the law because he doubts that any of them are willing to “put at risk” the legal security of their professionals.

“The current legality is very clear: residents in their last year can exercise more powers, but always under supervision, not tutoring, because they do not need a tutor at their side, an assistant to supervise them,” concluded the minister. at the end of the Interterritorial.