The lack of doctors that the province of Alicante is currently suffering will be aggravated in the next few years due to the high number of professionals who work in hospitals and health centres who are set to retire.
The “boomers”, the generation born in Spain between 1957 and 1977, are beginning to retire and doctors are no exception to this reality. According to data provided by the Generalitat Valenciana and also collected by the Ministry of Health, 22% of doctors in the Valencian public health system are over 60 years old and 52.6% are over 50 years old.
Applying this percentage to the province of Alicante, where some 7,700 doctors serve both in the public and private health systems, it means that in five years the retirement of nearly 1,700 professionals will begin. Currently, the Ministry of Health allows doctors who so request when they are 65 years old to extend their retirement age to 70 years, provided they meet a series of requirements, such as the physical capacity to continue working.
The need for doctors in the province is truly pressing in some surgical specialties, such as Surgery or Anaesthesiology, which prevents, in part, reducing the huge waiting lists for an operation that there are today. But there is also a lack of specialists in other areas that have experienced a vertiginous increase in recent years, such as Radiology, which translates into delays for tests such as MRIs, CT scans or X-rays, which on the other hand contributes to aggravating the delay to enter to operating room The smallest departments located in peripheral areas are the ones that suffer the most from this lack of doctors.
One of the oldest specialties in the Valencian Community, according to a report from the Ministry of Health, is Family Medicine, with 34% of specialists over 60 years of age, which means that in the coming years, in the province of Alicante alone, 400 family doctors are due to retire. Above this average of 22% of professionals over 60 years of age, there are also other specialties such as Allergology (30.6%), Clinical Analysis (43%), Pharmacology (44%) or Microbiology (37%).
The President of Valencia, Ximo Puig, has stated that the Generalitat is taking measures to alleviate the deficit of professionals. This year, the increase in the training offer is also compounded by the increase in staff in hospitals and health centres, with the creation of 6,000 new jobs. An increase that, at the moment, is insufficient to meet the needs of doctors suffered by the Valencian health system, for which all the unions and scientific societies have demanded that more jobs be created to alleviate the deficiencies generated after years of cuts and in which the population, and therefore the needs for medical assistance, have not stopped increasing.
Another reason that, in addition to the aging of the workforce, hides behind this lack of doctors is the insufficient number of training places for specialists, although in the last five years the Ministry of Health has been increasing training places in hospitals of the Valencian Community. In the hospitals of the province of Alicante there are currently 281 places accredited for the training of students who finish the Medicine degree in the different specialties. Five years ago, this figure was 224. Both Ximo Puig and the rector of the University of Alicante, Amparo Navarro, have argued that the creation of new places in the Faculty of Medicine will lead to an increase in training places for specialists.
