Albacete Medicine students rebel

They knew that for the 2023/2024 academic year there would be a transfer of students from the Albacete and Ciudad Real faculties of Medicine to the Toledo University Hospital, but the students staged a protest today at the Albacete faculty because they are concerned about how.

Medicine students from Albacete protest against the imminent transfer of students to Toledo

How are they going to cover the cost of living in Toledo? How are they going to overcome the bad communication between Albacete and the regional capital? And how are they going to get to a hospital that is on the outskirts? Will it work to depend on a deanery that is more than 100 kilometers away? Medical students have endless doubts months after the change.

The faculty is concerned because the ghost of a third faculty is once again rising, which is even opposed by the Deans’ Conference. And also because the teachers fear that the students cannot face the situation of finishing 118 and 246 kilometers from Albacete and Ciudad Real.

For the next academic year, students can take the entire degree in Albacete (90 places) or in Ciudad Real (60 places), but not all of them. There will be those who have to attend the first two years in those cities and from the third year onwards at the Complejo Hospitalario Universitario de Toledo (Albacete-Toledo 35 places or Ciudad Real-Toledo 15 places).

Thus, a percentage of the students who have entered the Albacete and Ciudad Real faculties of Medicine this year will have to finish their training, starting in the 2023-2024 academic year, at the new Toledo University Hospital.

However, this path began in the 2016-2107 academic year, with teaching by the sixth-year rotary at the Virgen de la Salud Hospital and at the National Hospital for Paraplegics.

Students ask to “postpone” the decision

• Pablo Rubio, a second-year student, and Lucía Lara, a third-year student representative, have denounced that, five months after making the move to Toledo, the students have no official information on how or when a transfer will take place regarding the that they are concerned about both the quality of the training and the accommodation and the fact of living between Albacete and Toledo. They are uncertain about the difficulties in training between two hospitals, one of them, the new one, being in a polygon, surrounded by traffic jams, with high rents. In this context, they ask “to postpone the decision to organize things as they should to guarantee the well-being and mental health of the students.”

The Faculty of Medicine assures that it is working to correct the problems

For its part, the Faculty of Medicine has communicated that its position is none other than to “continue working as we are doing up to now so that our students get the best possible training.” In this sense, the management team emphasizes: «We are working on a proposal in which we will be able to make use of other existing resources in the region. In this process, hard work is being done to avoid/correct problems that may occur. We understand the demands of the students and we trust in the resolution of those that are in our hands, always working on constructive communication and dialogue, “concludes the statement.