Being a healthcare professional has never been easy because it requires extensive preparation. From the moment of entering the university the problems begin because there are few places and many interested parties. But once young people leave school, the complications are even greater. Although it is a situation that has existed for decades, the current pandemic has made it more evident that doctors suffer from job insecurity.
All the adversities that doctors face
In that sense, even from the formative stage, exploitation begins. All students become Undergraduate Internal Physicians (MIP) during the penultimate year of the degree. Although the intention is for them to become familiar with the work in hospitals, in the end it is too demanding of them.
To begin with, the shifts of up to 36 hours in a row are already seen as something normal although if analyzed in the background it can even be classified as modern slavery. Forcing a person to provide medical care under these conditions threatens their health. While fatigue is one of the factors that increases the risk of making mistakes. Therefore, a vicious circle is generated in which all parties are affected.
While the last year of training consists of social service. For this stage thousands of young people are sent to health centers in rural areas where they are abandoned without protection. Attacks of various kinds against doctors-in-training have become frequent and the consequences are sometimes deadly.
Problems have increased due to the pandemic
But now it is necessary to add the pandemic as a new factor that has caused doctors to suffer from even greater job insecurity. Due to the excess of patients, in some hospitals doctors had to increase their working hours. They were months of work without rest to be able to attend to all the people who arrived daily.
In April of this year, the National Autonomous University of Mexico (UNAM) published the study In total job insecurity, health workers face the Covid-19 pandemic in Mexico. There it is mentioned that the doctors were forgotten at the beginning of the health emergency.
In this regard, in various hospitals throughout the country there were constant demonstrations about the lack of Personal Protective Equipment (PPE). Despite the adverse conditions, the doctors and nurses continued with their work even though their own integrity was at risk.
Similarly, it is mentioned that doctors suffer from job insecurity because there are thousands who work for fees. Within the health union there are at least 80 thousand people with this modality and in some cases they have remained that way for more than 15 years. Therefore, they do not have benefits such as seniority, Christmas bonus and vacations.
Although these types of problems have existed for years, it has been since the appearance of Covid-19 that they have increased. Despite the importance of health, those in charge of caring for the population are more neglected than the patients themselves.