Students of the bachelor’s degree in comprehensive medicine and community health that is taught at the Benito Juárez García Welfare Universities protested last week in front of the National Palace and in some cities of the country. The complaints focus on the lack of teachers, the non-existence of practices within hospitals and the low quality of the infrastructure in the schools. A couple of days later, the head of the Coordinator of Universities disqualified the protests and considered that the students who went out to express their disagreement with the education they are receiving are idle.
The implications of the reported conditions are diverse from the legal point of view, and for this it is worth remembering some issues. The Universities for Well-being work under the coordination of a decentralized public body, which was created on July 30, 2019 by President Andrés Manuel López Obrador. Among its objectives is to provide quality higher education focused on students located mainly in areas of high and very high marginalization of the country, as well as on applicants who demand admission to public institutions.
Today there are more than 130 schools around the country, among which 20 teach the comprehensive medicine and community health program. In this regard, it is important to remember that the medical career has a broad regulatory framework that has been developed over the years with the aim that people who study it receive quality education and protect the health of the population. These provisions are found both in the General Health Law, in its regulations and, in particular, in the Mexican Official Standard NOM-EM-033-SSA3-2022 Health education. Criteria for the use of medical care establishments as clinical fields for clinical cycles and undergraduate internships for the medical degree.
The syllabus that is taught in the Universities for Well-being indicates that students will develop activities in community clinical fields from the first cycle of study, this is not the case. One of the main claims of young people is that they have not carried out clinical cycle practices within hospitals despite what is established in the program.
The program details that the comprehensive medicine and community health career has 41 subjects distributed in three areas of knowledge (primary health care and community health, comprehensive study of the human being in medicine and tools for reflection and action in health), in addition boarding school and social service. However, if you look closely at the document, you can see some inconsistencies. On the one hand, the details of the collaboration agreements with health institutions for the clinical cycles prior to the undergraduate internship are not attached or specified. On the other hand, even when the study program refers to the boarding school, confusion is observed between it and social service, since only with respect to the latter is it said that the operational-academic program is annexed, although it is not publicly available.
The previous situation allows us to understand that the concern of young people is not fortuitous, nor is it minor. We are facing the risk that the right to education of these young people will be violated, but at the same time there is a serious danger that in the short term this violation of rights translates into the violation of the right to health of the people who will receive health care services from those who graduated from the Universities for Wellness.
The Supreme Court has recognized that the content of the right to higher education is not only focused on the distribution of a basic good, such as the creation of Universities for Well-being, but that this type of training must provide the necessary tools to that people can materialize the life plan they chose. In this way, those young people who opted for the alternative of the Universities for Well-being under the promise that they would receive the necessary and quality training could see this right violated.
An additional factor is that higher education is also associated with the achievement of socially relevant objectives, as in this case is the health of the poorest population in the country. However, far from fulfilling this objective, it seems that de facto conditions are being created that will impact not only the preparation of students, the possibilities of accessing a job and the realization of their life plan; but neither will the desired social benefit be obtained, since the medical care services that will be offered in the most vulnerable regions will not comply with essential elements of the right to health such as acceptability and quality.
Far from censoring the protests of medical students, it is necessary for the educational authorities to take them seriously, since their demands underlie not only the demand to receive quality education, but also the commitment and concern to return to their communities to offer adequate medical services. .