THE MORNING
June 30, 2024 at 1:44 p.m.
This mobilization is part of the ongoing support of parents for their children who have been on strike for seven months. The students are demanding an improvement in the conditions of medical training, a reversal of the decisions to reduce the years of study and a limitation on the number of students admitted to already overcrowded faculties, which complicates placements for internships in hospitals and health centers.
Parents are also demanding the same rights to theoretical training and the number of hours of clinical internships as students in previous years. For them, the reduction in clinical internship hours from 4,500 to 3,900 is an injustice. They also denounce the blocking of dialogue with students, thus aggravating the crisis despite the signs of calm observed at the beginning of June. “We are still hoping for a definitive resolution to the crisis in the faculties of medicine and pharmacy to save the current academic year,” reports a parent. Expressing his discontent at seeing his son’s future threatened, this father was keen to denounce the unilateral scheduling of second-semester exams by the Ministry of Higher Education. He stressed that the choice of this timing was inappropriate for students, leading to an exam boycott rate of over 96%. He called on the authorities to intervene urgently to reopen dialogue and negotiate seriously with the students, in order to avoid a blank year, which seems imminent if effective solutions are not found quickly to satisfy all parties.
For her part, a mother of a student at the Faculty of Medicine and Pharmacy in Tangier said that the deterioration of the situation in the faculties reflects, in her opinion, the lack of seriousness of the government, through the Ministries of Health and Higher Education, in managing the demands of future doctors and pharmacists. She believes that the suspension of dialogue and the worsening of the crisis will lead to a deterioration of conditions in the faculties, with serious consequences for the future and the competence of future health professionals.
Parents of medical and pharmacy students insist on the need for the government to urgently respond to the students’ demands. They point out that their children suffer from difficult training conditions and overcrowding in hospitals and training centers. According to them, the partial solutions proposed by the government will not be sufficient until the root causes of the sector’s problems are addressed. They therefore call for the opening of a serious and responsible dialogue with student representatives to find consensual solutions, guaranteeing their rights and contributing to improving the quality of medical training, in order to guarantee the success of the major project of reforming the health system.
