Requiem for Family Medicine

What have they done about you, family medicine and society? You are the gateway to the health system. Their mouths were filled in the 1980s with talk of specialization… Here you are now, neglected for decades, without investments, without goals, without prospects, your doctors exposed to the wrath of users and no one to defend them; With managers of independent communities unable to regain their lost dignity, with bad contracts and poor working conditions… It is strange that some of these managers come from the same specialty that they do not know how to demand or give prestige to.



Now the health centers are empty, the primary care doctors are tired of being the girls of the health system. And in keeping with the pandemic, they decided to stand up and stop receiving people personally, and to take care of the administrative jobs in which they wasted their time in such a miserable way.

The first mistake

Do you know whose fault it was first? from the Socialist Party when it was ruling in the 1980s, which stripped doctors of power and filled them with tasks that did not suit them; It was when the Ministry of Health was still centralizing the health administration and INSALUD was offering a minimum level of health equality among the Spaniards, before the transfers filled most of the health services in the autonomous communities with ineffective bureaucrats, with honorable exceptions. There the first stone was removed from the pyramid in which it ended up.

Now, young doctors don’t want to go to health centers for training. Why? Charging far less than qualified staff, disrespecting users, and their lack of career prospects and motivators? A building that has been collapsing for twenty years has not been rebuilt for months or years; Even less so if you lack the experience and knowledge to do so and are swayed by ideological prejudices that invalidate almost any initiative.

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return authority

Return teams’ authority and decision-making power to primary care physicians. Improve your working conditions and incentives, your professional career. You fiercely and relentlessly persecute those who disrespect you, those who attack you, those who ignore you.. Perhaps in this way they will reorient the specialty and again make it attractive to students and young doctors. As long as this is not done, all pronouncements and plans will be a dead letter, as happened with the recent MIR recall, where the increase in the number of positions did not solve anything; In fact, they’ve been covering more than last year.

We pray for the sick and those who care for them and for the family medicine we all need.

Aileen Morales

"Beer nerd. Food fanatic. Alcohol scholar. Tv practitioner. Writer. Troublemaker. Falls down a lot."

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