New Fees for Private Student Placements in Canary Islands Public Health System
The Canary Islands Health Service (SCS) is setting prices for students from private universities and training centers to complete their practical placements in public health centers and hospitals. The regional government has opened a public consultation on a report to establish fixed unit rates, responding to the “growing number of requests” from these private institutions seeking access for their students to the public healthcare system for training.
Standardizing Training Costs
Until now, students from private institutions could undertake placements in public hospitals and health centers through individual agreements between their companies and the SCS, each with its own specific financial conditions. The SCS now aims to unify these fees. The current public prices for health services provided by the SCS are outlined in a decree dating back to June 2009. Now, the Ministry of Health intends to incorporate training placements into this framework through a modification of that decree.
Proposed Hourly Rates for Trainers
The proposed fee structure is based on the professional category of the teaching staff supervising the students. The hourly rates are set at €6.77 for Group A1 (Medicine); €4.46 for A2 (Nursing); €3.33 for C1 (Laboratory, Radiology, or Oral Hygiene Technicians); and €2.92 for C2 (Nursing and Pharmacy Assistants).
Justifying the New Fee Structure
The Health Ministry states that it has conducted a cost study to enable the public administration to achieve a “fair recovery” of the costs incurred by providing training within public centers. It determined that the most appropriate method is to use the hourly cost of the trainer’s professional category, composed of their basic remuneration plus the employer’s Social Security costs.
The report notes that private healthcare training centers “have proliferated” in recent years, “progressively becoming a relevant economic actor.” In turn, the SCS, as the “main provider of healthcare assistance” in the Canaries and due to its “size and geographical dispersion” across the archipelago, has been the subject of “increasing requests” from these companies for training placements.
The Fernando Pessoa University Case
The report proposing the decree modification was signed on September 12th by the SCS’s Director General of Economic Resources, Sebastián Fuentes. Just one week later, on September 19th, the Canary Islands Parliament forwarded to deputy Yoné Caraballo (New Canaries-Canarian Bloc) the Health Ministry’s response to his question about why a private university, Fernando Pessoa, had been exempted from paying for its students to use SCS facilities.
The original agreement with Fernando Pessoa, signed in September 2020, required the private university to pay the SCS a fee for its students to undertake placements in public health centers and hospitals—specifically, ten euros per day per Nursing student and fifteen euros per Medical student. However, this changed in September 2023, a few months after the current government, formed by Canarian Coalition (CC) and the Popular Party (PP), took office. The agreement was modified to relieve the university of these payments.
The Health Ministry justified this decision at the time—and reiterated it in response to the deputy’s question—by stating that no public price for training placements existed and that the financial compensation had been replaced by the “provision of a number of places in its degrees and master’s programs for SCS staff.”
Other Agreements and Legal Precedents
In 2022, the Health Ministry also signed an agreement with the European University of the Canary Islands (UEC) for external curricular placements for students of Nursing, Physiotherapy, and several master’s programs, in exchange for “financial compensation.”
A February 2019 ruling by Spain’s Constitutional Court struck down part of a health law in the Valencian Community that prohibited Medical students from private universities from accessing practical training in the public sector. The agreement between the SCS and Fernando Pessoa was signed a year and a half after this ruling and initially included financial compensation as a requirement.
Public Universities Have Priority
The relationships between universities and healthcare institutions are governed by a royal decree from 1986. According to this regulation, university hospitals “may not be linked by agreement or convention to more than one university for the same degree program, except in exceptional situations, in which the university with the initial agreement (the public ones, ULPGC and ULL, in the case of the Canaries) must agree to the extension of that hospital’s activity to another university or universities.” This means that the public universities of the archipelago have priority for teaching placement spots.
