Argentina's medical residency exam sees high demand for surgery, anesthesiology; fewer takers for geriatrics

Argentina's national medical residency entrance exam has undergone a significant restructuring, moving from a unified system to a decentralized, jurisdiction-based evaluation. This year, 5663 medical professionals are eligible to compete for positions in national, military, and private hospitals that have adopted the new national assessment.

The most in-demand specialties continue to be general surgery, anesthesiology, obstetrics and gynecology, traumatology, pediatrics, and ophthalmology. Conversely, fields such as obstetrics, emergency medicine, physiatry, mastology, rheumatology, speech therapy, and geriatrics are among the least requested. Notably, foreign applicants, who constitute a quarter of the participants, are showing a strong preference for cardiology, diagnostic imaging, and otorhinolaryngology.

In addition to medical residencies, there are 597 applicants vying for fewer than a hundred nursing vacancies offered by 12 national hospitals and several private institutions. Biochemists are also competing for 23 available positions in laboratories and research centers. The total number of applicants for this year's exam is less than half of the 13,476 who participated in the previous year's unified exam.

The shift to a decentralized system follows irregularities reported in the previous year's exam, including the leak of questions and answers and organized fraud. The new process requires applicants to register for specific residency programs within different public or private institutions, marking a departure from the unified examination that had been in place since 2011.