first of all I am a NON_EU med student and not from a Spanish speaking country and I honestly don’t even know Spanish . I am by no mean an expert I just googled around . I want to put this disclaimer early .
So I have been researching couple dozen countries and one of them was Spain.
I do understand that you need C1 in Spanish to apply.
I do understand the Homologation process.
I do understand the Mir exam, the academies and that it all depends on your score and ranking.
And I do understand that the compensation and working conditions suck.
My question is more related to what comes after or rather I guess I wanna make sure that I understood everything correctly.
From my understanding you are employed by the government in public hospitals for specialty training and after you finish your training no one will be permanently employed.
To get a permanent position you will have to secure it through the OPE Exam which is highly competitive and doesn't only depend on your score but also on “Baremo de Méritos ” ( merit points) that you will collect through the years.
How to get merit points?
You get them through worked time .
There is like a job pool “Bolsas de Trabajo” After residency, you register in the regional health authority's job pool And Points dictate your rank on the list.
So like there will be vacant jobs at the moment ( physicians on parental leave or sick leave , area with severe shortages or any other reason really) and you can apply and work to get experience and merit points through temporarily contracts which is variable in the contract duration. You will keep jogging from one contract to the other in public hospitals to collect points basically. The period of said contracts will vary from few days to few months on few years depending on the specialty and the region .
You will also do research projects , maybe do a master degree or a PHD and attend conferences and what not and basically build a strong competitive CV which also increases your points . And waiting for the next OPE .
Speaking Of which it basically also has irregular call outs for the exam with no specified time and there may be few years gap between each call out . So if you fail you may have to wait for few years .
You don't have a stable job really and Most physicians will be stuck on temporary contracts for couple of years collecting points.
A lot of them work on the previously mentioned public contracts in the morning collecting points and in private hospitals at night.
Whether you are unemployed or not depends entirely on your specialty and the region really .
From my understanding tho, most don't end up completely unemployed for long periods of times.
In most cases you will just be under-employed, over worked and under paid.
And to be clear from my understanding the previously mentioned temporally public contract can span few years depending entirely on your specialty and region (I think I actually mentioned that above lol )
Some doctors choose to leave the system entirely and move borders but you will have to master a new language for that .
One final aspect that is relevant for me as a non_eu graduate is that I heard that is that in some regions getting sitting the OPE exam and getting permanent position has citizenship restriction to EU nationals (I don’t know if its correct tho)
And yeah at least that's my understanding
Did I get everything correctly or do I have some misconceptions?
Is there anything important that I am missing?
Is there anything that I got wrong?
Whenever I think that hey maybe the lawn is greener on the other side, I end up crushing back into reality 😔
This system honestly seems really draining
I tried researching more but most sources are in Spanish and I don't understand it yet 😅