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SPAIN

Basic Medical Education

In Spain at the University in order to be recognized a discipline as a knowledge Area there are different requirements. It is necessary to have homogeneous knowledge objectives, to prove an historical tradition and to have a national and international research field. In an extensive document semfyc has presented all that requirements to the last Deans Conference and again our old fashioned university has not accepted that family medicine is a different knowledge area. One Annex of the document was the last WONCA definition of the core content of Family Medicine/General Practice in Europe. That means that for at least the next four years we are not going to have family medicine Departments in our country. But in 21 of the 27 Medical Schools an important proportion of family doctors have some different kinds of teaching activity: In three universities the Family Medicine is a mandatory subject, in other eight universities the subject is optional, but with a very good acceptance by the students, in other seventeen universities the students have mandatory stages in primary care health centres and finally in ten universities that kind of stages are on a voluntary basis.

Vocational training

We are still very active in that field. Since the establishment of the speciality in 1978 more that 18000 trainees have been educated, and we still teach 1800 new residents each year in 53 Teaching Units with an amount of 750 health centres and 2900 tutors. As you know we have a compulsory three years programme, in which more that 50% of the time is spend by the trainees in primary health care settings.

Continuing professional development

The national society (SEMFYC) and also the regional societies are very active in offering different kinds of courses (clinical, methodological, quality, communication,) presential and also distance activities accreditated by a national/regional body, but if still the participation is not compulsory for the ordinary GP's a great number of doctors, specially the younger ones take part in them.

The Ministry of Education with the collaboration of semfYc has developed an OSCE, in order to give the qualification of specialist in family and community medicine to doctors that graduated before 1995, and the number of participants will be of about 1000 people.

Higher professional training

Different teaching activities are dressed to tutors in the different regions, and just now in Barcelona we have a national meeting with the participation of teachers of all over the country, and the topics to be discussed are again formative and summative assessment, the accreditation model and the new proposal for a four years programme for the speciality.

Also different master degrees are offered in different parts of the country, mostly organized by different bodies: university, other institutions with the support of the local scientific society.