- In the 2021-2022 cycle, enrollment in public and private institutions, especially Medicine, reached more than 150 thousand students.
- Dr. Hugo López-Gatell Ramírez said that the training of personnel that responds to the needs of the transformation of the health system should be promoted.
- The IMSS went from having 5,416 residents in 2016 to 10,659 in 2022.
In recent years there has been a debate regarding the number of doctors that our country has. According to the federal authorities, there is a severe deficit in all areas and for this reason various initiatives have been undertaken to achieve an adequate balance. While one of the priorities of the current government is to offer care in the most unprotected areas.
With this in mind, an inter-institutional meeting was held to advance the educational transformation in health. The purpose is to integrate commissions that allow the proposals of the different actors in the sector to be specified, with the aim of formulating an action plan.
This was determined during the work meeting by the Secretaries of Public Education (SEP), Health, the Mexican Institute of Social Security (IMSS), the National Autonomous University of Mexico (UNAM), the National Association of Universities and Institutions of Higher Education (Anuies) and various higher education institutions in the country.
The Undersecretary of Higher Education of the SEP, Luciano Concheiro Bórquez, considered that, during the meeting, held in the Palace of the UNAM School of Medicine, a wide range of proposals were submitted. Both to transform Higher Education institutions in terms of the training of Health personnel, as well as regarding the way in which the change strategy should be acted upon.
Total medical students and residents in Mexico
Before more than 20 rectors of universities, as well as 20 directors of medical schools in the country, Concheiro Bórquez explained that during the 2021-2022 cycle, the total enrollment in public and private higher education institutions in special in Medicine, reached 153,830 students, and just over 42,000 enrollment in medical specialty programs.
He added that “the jump we had in 2019, pandemic involved, is also essential to understand how the number of graduates, singularly, grew in terms of both doctors and specialists.”
Doctors are lacking and poorly distributed
The undersecretary of Prevention and Health Promotion, Hugo López-Gatell Ramírez, specified that the country faces a deficit of close to 120,000 professionals in different areas of health, in the clinical field and in the management, stewardship, governance and execution of services, accumulated since the 1980s.
He considered it necessary to territorially, institutionally and occupationally redistribute health personnel, since they are mostly concentrated in urban areas. Likewise, he said that the training of personnel that responds to the needs of the transformation of the health system should be promoted.
“This government’s aspiration is to have a mostly public health system, based on the primary health care model. We have no doubt about this, but the opposite still persists: a fragmented, overmedicalized, overspecialized system, concentrated on technological aspects in urban areas”.
He affirmed that the sustainability of the Health sector in terms of sufficiency of personnel implies better articulation between higher education institutions (HEIs) and health, as well as identifying the incentives and disincentives that strengthen this link, such as salary or living conditions of the and professionals, among others.
He indicated that the sufficiency of health personnel for the proper functioning and sustainability of the Health sector makes a radical change necessary with respect to what was done in Mexico and in many countries in the last 40 years, which was to encourage the private sector as a substitute for the public .
Increase in places in the IMSS
The general director of the Mexican Institute of Social Security (IMSS), Zoé Robledo Aburto, pointed out that various actions have been carried out that have allowed increasing the number of offices, places, improving the well-being and safety of medical personnel, in order to promote their roots in entities that need them most.
He reported that the IMSS, being the institution that trains half of the specialists in the country, went from 5,416 residents in 2016 to 10,659 in 2022, and until the 2021-2022 cycle there were three additional systems of training of specialists to respond to needs.
He added that four years ago, 3,640 medical specialists graduated from the IMSS, while this year there were 30 percent more: 4,886; in 2023 it is expected to be 50 percent more, 5,618; by 2024 it will be 7,486, and by 2025 at least an increase of 114 percent compared to the 2018 figure.
He commented that, within the transformation of state health systems, such as Nayarit and Tlaxcala, where the IMSS-Wellness model already operates, work is being done on the coverage of specialist doctors with active participation with the National Day of Recruitment of Doctors and Physicians Specialists.
The rector of the UNAM, Enrique Graue Wiechers, pointed out that this meeting was held as a follow-up to previous meetings where the issue has been analyzed since “none of us is unaware of the problem we have in the distribution of general practitioners, in the shortage of specialists and in the problems that the social service has recently presented”.
Graue Wiechers added that there is a historical shortage of specialists, in addition to the need to analyze the conflicts faced in social service, a very important element in the training of the doctor, as well as in the ability to obtain skills and abilities.