The Paraguayan Medical Circle (CPM) issued a statement denouncing that the crisis in medical education in the country is directly affecting the beneficiaries of the Social Security Institute (IPS). According to the union, the massive presence of students in hospitals is saturating services already under high daily demand.
Through its Anti-Corruption in Health Office, the medical organization recalled that the main mission of the IPS is to provide medical care and social security to its contributors, and that the institution was not originally created to be a university training school.
The document points out that Paraguay is experiencing an “exponential and disorderly” growth in the supply of medical courses, with over 45,000 students in training. To fulfill their internships, various public and private universities simultaneously use the IPS healthcare facilities.
This situation, according to the CPM, generates constant operational tensions, overcrowding in consultation rooms, and discomfort for both patients and their families as well as the medical teams on duty. Furthermore, the union warns that the huge number of students makes adequate supervision by professors impossible.
For the CPM, the start of the new IPS administration represents the ideal moment to contain this situation. “If the IPS decides to collaborate with national medical training, this participation must respond to the real capacity of its facilities, without meaning a deterioration in care or an overload for beneficiaries,” the statement says.
The Paraguayan Medical Circle proposed the immediate creation of an institutional working group to analyze the problem and implement four urgent measures:
- Require official accreditation: review all current agreements with universities and suspend those courses that do not have quality approval from the National Agency for Evaluation and Accreditation of Higher Education (ANEAES).
- Calculate real capacity: determine how many students each hospital can effectively receive, respecting a reasonable limit of students per patient and per doctor.
- Evaluate language proficiency: strictly verify whether students comply with communication and language management norms (according to Law 7324) to ensure they can properly communicate with patients.
- Eliminate the “business” of internships: review the fees that the IPS charges universities for the use of its hospitals. The union calls for the gradual elimination of these payments to prevent student admission from being seen as a business and to prioritize only the real capacity of health centers.