Amaya Pombo C, García Pérez MA

DEMOGRAFÍA MÉDICA EN ESPAÑA. MIRANDO AL FUTURO.

(Physicians’ Demography in Spain. Looking at future)

Madrid: Fundación CESM; 2005.

We have renewed our report El Número de Médicos en España. Análisis de una situación crítica (The physicians' number in Spain. Analysis of a critical situation), published in 1999, including physicians licensed until 2001 and with specialised training completed before july 1st, 2004. Consequently, it refers to physicians with legal capacity to develop this profession in accordance with the conditions of European directives, and below retirement age (65). We use the term "physicians with professional exercise capability" for this concept. This is not the total amount of active doctors, since many of the doctors registered in this report could have quitted working or maybe they can be working abroad.

Because an official census of doctors doesn’t exist in Spain, we have looked for information in two complementary sources:

·        The habilitation for general medical exercise’s register. It includes all general practitioner who, at entry of EU directive 86/457/CEE (1995), were graduated in Medicine and that were permitted, by law, to exert as general practitioner in the National Health System without specialised postgraduate training in Family Medicine (compulsory from that year).

·        The MIR examination register, 1969-2001. It’s the register of all physicians inscribed for the MIR examination to access to postgraduate specialised training (as “Médico Interno Residente”, Intern and Resident Physician)

These sources don’t include all the physicians with exercise capacity in Spain, because some of then have acquired specialist graduation by means other than MIR; nevertheless, this is a little group who will retire from exercise by age in the next ten to fifteen years. So our study represents a good aproximation to real situation; furthermore, data from the Spanish Medical Council show similar global results than ours.

The principal results from our study are the following:

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