He Ministry of Science, Innovation and Universities seeks to allow the processes of homologation of foreign university degrees -including those of Medicine and Nursing– initiated under the protection of the old Royal Decree 967/2014 – already repealed by the Royal Decree approved in 2022 – can continue to be processed by electronically and not just having to present the necessary documentation in person. To this end, the department that directs Diana Morant has put out to public consultation a Draft Order to modify another previous ministerial order, ECD/2654/2015, of December 3, which governs the rules for the development and application of the aforementioned RD of 2014.
As detailed on the ministry’s website, the fact that there are two parallel procedures for homologation of university degrees – that of 2014 and that of 2022, which does allow processing through Electronic Office-, may “involve a greater delay due to the barrier effect of the need to comply with the procedures of the previous procedure through a request for an appointment in Spanish registries for the presentation of documents on paper, or the postal notification of the processing acts to the interested party, compared to the processing through the Ministry’s Electronic Headquarters that is carried out of the files initiated after the approval of Royal Decree 889/2022, of October 18.
In this sense, it is detailed that both RD 203/2021, of March 30, which approves the Regulation of action and operation of the public sector by electronic means, and Law 39/2015, of October 1, of the Common Administrative Procedure of Public Administrations, “have given a legal nature to the right of citizens to relate electronically with Public Administrationsas well as their obligation to provide themselves with the necessary means and systems so that this right could be exercised.”
This project of Order modification It is the umpteenth measure implemented by the Ministry of Science, Innovation and Universities to unblock the validation of university degrees whose files began to be processed when the old RD of 2014 was still in force.
The crux of the matter lies in the fact that, although more and more requests based on the RD of 2022 are accumulating, until all the pending procedures initiated with the previous rule are resolved, only new requests related to foreign titles from countries of the European Higher Education Area and in which a general measure adopted by the Commission can be applied, which contributes to making the traffic jam worse.
Negotiation with foreign doctors and nurses
Regarding the previous attempts to ‘uncover’ the situation, as explained by representatives of the Fair Homologation Now platform in a report resulting from the meeting held in March with ministerial officials and to which they had access Medical Writinganother of the keys to the delay in the validation processes is that, in cases of incomplete filesthere are occasions in which Diana Morant’s department requests the interested parties again not only for the missing documents, but also for some of those already presented, which gives rise to duplicity errors.
Those affected also presented a study in which they regretted that some of the files were more than three years late, when the RD of 2014 sets a maximum period of six months to resolve each procedure. Always according to the version of the platformists, the deputy director of Titles of the ministry, Maria del Valle Perezexplained that in some of these cases it was the applicants themselves who had not responded to the ministerial notifications.
The problem is that these notifications, for now, can only be made by postal mail, a circumstance that in the same study is highlighted as a factor that “significantly increases the duration of the process.” However, also according to the members of the platform, the general secretary of Universities, José Manuel Pingarrónrefused to use email as an alternative: “They say that they cannot use email for these cases, because if they did, the applicant could file an appeal against the Ministry of Universities,” reads the report of the meeting.
From Fair Homologation Now It is also highlighted that, in a previous meeting last December, Pingarrón announced that a computer service was going to be launched in January to provide specific assistance to people whose files were incomplete. In March, however, it was indicated that, “due to technical problems”, it had not been possible to put this tool into operation, whose launch would be delayed until April 1, but via telephone.
The decentralization of approval, in the air
Since March, the Government of the Basque Country has been empowered to approve the equivalence of foreign university degrees in its territory, which led to a knock-on effect in other autonomous communities such as Aragon and Catalonia. Minister Morant has not closed the doors at any time to the possibility of decentralizing homologation powers as a way to expedite pending processes, despite having public rejection from unions, scientific societies and political parties such as the PP due to fear. that it generates territorial inequalities.
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