There’s an exam for that…

Pretty near the hospital

“How’s are you?” I asked, sitting down and getting my books out of my bag as the doctors put their white coats on and stuffed their pockets with scraps of paper, reference books and stethoscopes.

“It’s not a good day.” They said, “How do you say despedida in English?”

“Depends what you mean, can you explain a little more?”

“Yesterday some doctors were despedida’d and sent home.”

“Fired or made redundant?”

So it turns out that yesterday, with no warning fifty-some doctors were made redundant. This was a bit of a shock. Many had more than ten years service in the hospital. So now they face having to move to another part of Spain to find work, because all over Asturias the lack of tax revenue due to the economic downturn, la crisis means that public sector workers are facing a difficult future.

One of the problems is that to get a job in the public sector you have to do exams called oposiciones or opos. That’s for pretty much any public sector job. You want to be a rheumatologist, there’s an exam; a teacher, exam;  a council worker, exam; police, prison guard, you name it, there’s an exam.

Except when there isn’t.

In the hospital, in that department, there haven’t been any opos for fifteen years because there are no available places. If you get the top marks in an opo, you get the job you want and it’s for life. Which is why so many Spanish folk are preparing for them (I know half a dozen people who are in the process of doing opo preparation, there’s a whole industry of academies and tutors out there). If there are no opos you may still have a job but it’s an interina, a temporary job and you can be tossed out like these doctors were (with no more than one month’s pay).

Oposiciones were instituted, I’ve been told, in response to the old way of doing things, which was to know the right people, and to have the right politics (and it was right being the Franco era) in order to get a job. The exams were supposed to bring about a certain egalitarianism in candidate selection. Which it did. But then it went a bit far according to some Spanish friends, and the whole job-for-life at the end of it seems to encourage a certain lethargy  in those who have achieved that holy grail.

So to be a doctor, first you need to get the degree, then do an exam called the MIR in order to get onto a speciality (if you do well you can pick your speciality, if you don’t then you’re headed for wherever they tell you, you didn’t want to be  a GP? Tough.). then you have to complete the residency requirements and then to progress from temporary contracts to permanent, the oposición. Up until that point you have no more job security than anyone else, and, in these times of crisis, it seems, less.