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Getting the latest healthcare news for you
Spain's national primary care representative is pushing for sweeping reforms to strengthen family medicine, cut administrative red tape, and restore physician leadership. Celia Román García is calling for digital tools and AI to handle routine admin tasks, freeing up doctors for actual patient care. She also wants to defend Spain's specialist training program and boost family medicine's presence in universities.
Spain's primary care system is overdue for a tune-up, according to Celia Román García, the national representative of the Urban Primary Care Physicians Section of Spain's Organización Médica Colegial (OMC). In a recent interview, she laid out an ambitious reform agenda centered on strengthening family medicine and pediatrics, reducing bureaucratic burden, and restoring physicians' professional leadership within the healthcare system.
A major focus of her agenda is cutting administrative overload. García argues that paperwork should follow the clinician who performs the procedure — not get offloaded onto primary care practices. She's championing digital medical records, patient portals, and AI as tools to streamline tasks like sick leave processing and report preparation, so doctors can spend more time with patients and less time at their desks.
García is also sounding the alarm on professional standards, defending Spain's MIR postgraduate training program and opposing the hiring of physicians without proper specialist credentials. She envisions family doctors as the "conductors" of coordinated, continuous patient care — and sees a stronger university presence for family medicine as key to elevating the specialty's profile.
Key Takeaways:
Why it matters: Primary care is the backbone of any equitable health system. If Spain's reforms take hold, they could serve as a model for other countries grappling with physician burnout and administrative overload in frontline medicine.
