Unlike other professions, here at least six years of training are required. Of these, the last two are boarding school and social service, a stage in which aspiring doctors practically have to live in hospitals. It is very complicated because it is when the days extend up to 36 continuous hours and you must always be willing to provide care to patients.
While if you want to be a specialist then you need to pass the National Exam for Medical Residency Applicants (ENARM) and dedicate more years to the training part. At the end of this long road, the minimum that is desired is to be able to aspire to a dignified life without deficiencies. The problem is that at least in Mexico it doesn’t always happen.
The working conditions that health professionals face are not always the best and when compared with those received by their colleagues from other nations the differences are stratospheric.
Differences too noticeable
The clearest sample can be seen by focusing only on salary. If the 38 countries that are part of the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) the one that offers the most attractive pay to specialists is the United States. On average they receive $ 230,000 a year (around 4,600,000 pesos). When making the conversion, a monthly income of 383 thousand pesos is obtained.
On the other hand, Mexico appears in the penultimate place due to the average salary of 25 thousand dollars a year (500 thousand pesos). The figure is equivalent to a payment of just over 41 thousand pesos a month. With this, a doctor in the United States receives practically nine times more than a Mexican one. Below you can see the annual salary of some representative OECD countries.
- United States – 230 thousand dollars.
- Canada – 161 thousand dollars.
- France – 149 thousand dollars.
- Greece – 67 thousand dollars.
- Portugal – 64 thousand dollars.
- Mexico – 25 thousand dollars.
But although we only focus on the salary part, there are also other aspects that make big differences. Hospital facilities and the number of personnel also have an impact on daily working hours. The current deficit facing Mexico means that medical personnel must perform various functions or extend their hours to attend to more patients than they are entitled to.