SIDI presses for medical‑needs solution
- SIDI formally asked Murcia’s education minister on April 29 to stop leaving teachers to handle students’ complex medical and drug needs alone. - The union wants each school to map affected pupils and then hire healthcare staff — especially nurses — instead of shifting risk onto teachers. - The fight matters because mainstream inclusion is expanding, but the staffing model still assumes medical support can be improvised.
School inclusion is the issue here, but the immediate problem is much more concrete: who gives medicine, who performs medical procedures, and who carries the risk when something goes wrong. On April 29, 2026, the Murcia teachers’ union SIDI sent a formal demand to the regional education minister asking for a solution for pupils with complex pharmacological and medical-technical needs in public schools. The union’s point is blunt — teachers say they are being pushed into health tasks they are not trained or legally protected to handle. SIDI’s proposed fix is just as blunt: identify the pupils who need this support and hire healthcare staff, especially nurses, to cover it. (sidimurcia.org) ### What actually triggered this? SIDI says it intensified visits to public schools across the Region of Murcia and kept hearing the same thing from management teams and teachers: there has been a noticeable rise in pupils with serious medical conditio(sidimurcia.org)appens now, and someone present has to respond. (sidimurcia.org) ### Why are teachers pushing back? Because this is not just extra work. It is a different kind of work. SIDI says teachers describe a “great sense of defenselessness” when they are the ones expected to intervene, since they do not know what their legal(sidimurcia.org)difficult — it asks them to operate outside their professional training. (sidimurcia.org) ### What does SIDI want the government to do? First, build a catalogue of pupils in schools who need this kind of pharmacological or medical intervention. Basically, count the problem properly before pretending it can be managed informally. Second, use(sidimurcia.org)rovised inside school staffing. (sidimurcia.org) ### Why does the catalogue matter so much? Because right now the system can shrug and treat each case as exceptional. A catalogue would do the opposite. It would turn scattered cases into a visible workload with numbers, centers, and staffing implications. That matters politically, but also practically — once the need is counted, it becomes harder to keep relying on goodwill, ad hoc routines, or whoever happens to be available that day. (sidimurcia.org) ### Isn’t this also about inclusion? Yes — but not in the vague slogan sense. Murcia’s own health and education guidance already assumes schools will adapt for pupils with rare diseases and coordinate educational responses around their needs. The catch(sidimurcia.org)l capacity inside the building. (murciasalud.es) ### Why is nursing the union’s preferred answer? Because nurses solve the exact mismatch SIDI is describing. The union is not asking for more teacher guidance or a thicker protocol binder. It is asking for staff whose training matches the task. That would also clarify responsibility — who administers treatment, who documents it, and who coordinates with families and health services. Right now, SIDI argues, that chain is too blurry. (sidimurcia.org) ### What happens if nothing changes? Schools keep doing what they are already doing — patching together responses case by case. Sometimes that means a teacher steps in. Sometimes it means anxiety, delay, or uneven support depending on the center. SIDI’s warning is that if a serious incident occurs, the political and legal responsibility will land on the education administration that allowed the gap to persist. (sidimurcia.org) ### Bottom line This is a staffing fight disguised as an inclusion fight. SIDI is saying Murcia cannot keep celebrating mainstream access for medically complex pupils while quietly expecting teachers to function as backup clinical staff. Either the region funds real medical support in schools, or it keeps running a system built on improvisation. (sidimurcia.org)
