14ymedio, Madrid, 23 September 2024 — Cuban doctors living in Spain have declared war on the bureaucratic jam of the Ministry of Universities, which prevents the certification of their degrees within a reasonable time. The doctors complain that it takes an average of two or three years to carry out this validation, when the law establishes a period of six months. Therefore, the Movement for Cuban Certification in Spain and the Association of Cuban Doctors in Spain have intensified their demands in the last year, and this Wednesday they will protest before the Congress of Deputies demanding solutions.
The work has been accumulating for too many years, which is why the Government approved in 2022 the obligation to process certification electronically, thinking that this would speed up the process. Although, according to the Fair Certification Now! platform, there was a significant reduction (from 50,677 applications in 2022 to 34,221 in 2023), the ease of submitting the documentation has also increased the number of files, so that at the end of that year, 45,000 had already accumulated, creating too many cases with the same number of officials in charge of managing them.
Although the General Secretariat of Universities issued, in February, a recommendation to order the processing of files for Spanish and European legal residents “through a specific way that allows rapid integration into the labor market,” the agony continues. According to the Fair Certification Now platform, among all the professions, there were more than 100,000 files backlogged.
From the Movement for Cuban Certification in Spain there is talk of an arbitrary paralysis of the applications for a year
Cuban doctors need to provide four documents to have their degrees certified in Spain: their degree, a certification of their grades, their work career and a certificate that guarantees that they are qualified to continue practicing their profession, all legalized by the Ministry of Foreign Affairs. However, health workers complain that the Cuban government systematically denies them the reference for their professional career, which extends the deadlines. In the Facebook group Cuban Doctors in Spain, the members advise starting to process the approval before living in the European country and “looking for a lawyer,” because the State is obliged to deliver everything that is asked of them.
Among them circulates the rumor – supposedly based on the officials of the Ministry of Universities – that Spain is considering no longer demanding the document in light of the Regime’s deliberate delays, but officially nothing has been said. From the Cuban Certification Movement in Spain, on the contrary, there is talk of an arbitrary shutdown on applications for Cuban doctors for a year, alluding to “a background check” by the Ministry.
“This selective and systematic discrimination not only harms the professional rights of these doctors, but seriously affects the Spanish health system, which currently faces challenges in the coverage of medical personnel and long waiting lists, which directly impacts patients and their families,” they denounce in a statement.
Cubans, like other non-EU workers, can join the national health system in two ways, either by taking the Medical Resident Intern entrance exam or through temporary contracts if the country’s different autonomous communities – which have health competitions – allow it. However, in both cases it is strictly necessary to have their degree certified.
According to the Community of Madrid, in that region alone there are more than 7,100 foreign doctors
According to the Community of Madrid, in that region alone there are more than 7,100 foreign doctors, most of whom are Cubans, Venezuelans and Argentinians, so the Minister of Health Fátima Matute has urged the Government of the nation to shorten the procedure. “Likewise, we ask you to help solve the situation of Cuban doctors residing in Spain who have an approved degree but who cannot practice because they lack the qualification certificate that the Cuban government denies them,” she wrote in a letter addressed to Mónica García, the Minister of Health.
The Ministry of Health approved this year an extraordinary call to approve non-EU specialists through specific exams that were held in the first quarter of the year, although they still had to have their degrees in general medicine validated.
In 2020, the worst year of the covid-19 pandemic in Spain, the Ministry of Universities certified the degrees of 134 Cubans – one of the nations with the most complete files, after Venezuela and Colombia – 82 of them during the state of alarm that was in force between March 15 and May 9 of that year, according to the department’s statistics provided to 14ymedio. A year later, in 2021, 564 doctors and 39 nurses of Cuban origin joined the Spanish health system after obtaining the relevant certifications, according to data from the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD).
Translated by Regina Anavy
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