In September of this year part of the Medicine students from Ciudad Real and Albacete will go to Toledo. Third-year students will be part of the new Ciudad Real-Toledo or Albacete-Toledo Medicine degree itinerary. It is about a change before which the students indicate that they lack information and, in fact, in Albacete, there has already been a student protest, in which they demand changes. In Ciudad Real the situation is similar and the students are waiting for the exams to finish and for a response from the UCLM to clarify how the degree will be developed in Toledo, in the local hospital, to plan a protest in view of the doubts generated by this transfer of students from the Ciudad Real campus to the Toledo campus.
“We need as many people as possible to come” to possible protests, explains Helena Pérez, a second-year Medicine student. Alejandro Segovia, one of the affected students, explains that the problem comes from pre-registration for the degree. In it “you had to mark if you wanted to do Ciudad Real-Toledo or only Ciudad Real and it was indicated that we were going to do the practices at the Toledo hospital”, which led some students to think that they were only practices, not the classes. So, when enrolling and starting the degree, several students thought about changing that box to do the degree for the full itinerary in Ciudad Real. “There was a meeting and we were told that it was going to be very difficult to change and that there were going to be situations of vulnerability, but there was not going to be an open decision.”
The pressure led to a call for a change of itinerary, which “should have come out in December”, but another of the demands has not yet been called, they pointed out. “In Albacete it is more difficult and that is why they started their protest.” In Ciudad Real there are 15 students who have to go to Toledo and in Albacete there are 35. The idea is that there are joint actions between students from both faculties.
Alejandro recalls that the change implies moving to Toledo for four years, with the increase in the cost of rent or changes in the lives of these students. Pérez points out, for his part, that they have been requesting information on the change since September of last year without having received it. “They did not inform us that pre-registration was binding” and hence these protests trying to get more clarity and allow those who do not want or cannot go to Toledo to continue in Ciudad Real.