For 22 days, the doctor Juan Pablo Ovalle remained on strike in front of the headquarters of the Ministry of Education as a protest, after more than a year, they did not validate his specialization in Thoracic Surgery, with training in Lung Transplantation, which he studied for 5 years at the University Hospital of La Coruna, in Spain.

However, according to information from the newspaper El Tiempo, On Friday night the doctor finally received the good news that the Ministry of Education endorsed his degree. “With information provided by the training institution, the title of doctor Juan Pablo Ovalle meets the validation requirements”, they announced from that entity.

Since last January 12, the Colombian doctor has been sleeping outside the headquarters of the Ministry of Education in Bogota, and then he intensified his protest with a hunger strike that began on January 15, and that finally ended on Friday night.

Ovalle, who is a doctor at the Pedagogical and Technological University of Tunja, stated during his strike that since November 2019 he made the request to the ministry but that he has not received an accurate response. “During these 13 months I have found only bureaucracy, obstacles and errors in my process, errors that have repeated in many other cases of medical professionals who have studied abroad,” said the doctor.

In the magazine Semana, the doctor announced that he was going on a hunger strike with the aim that the Minister of Education, Maria Victoria Angulo, and the Ombudsman, Carlos Camargo, would accept a meeting for him. “From here I do not move until a fair agreement with the Ministry of Education that ends all this negligent and arbitrary action in my validation process. Where is the Office of the Attorney General of the Nation and Fernando Carrillo exercising his control function?”, the doctor wrote on January 13.

Before the disciplinary body Ovalle denounced the irregularities and arbitrariness that the Ministry had committed in its validation process. However, the entity a day before had sent him a statement in which they expressed that as it was already known to him, The Ministry of Education denied the validation of the title on June 10, 2020 and, before an appeal for reversal, it was denied again on October 2, 2020.

The health professional assured that he had provided apostille from The Hague, in addition to the legalized signatures of the director of the Galician Health Service in the Autonomous Community of Galicia and the director of interinstitutional relations of the Junta de Galicia. “I have been denied several resolutions and being a thoracic surgeon, the group that evaluated me It was made up of a dentist, a bacteriologist and a nutritionist,” said Ovalle.

In El Tiempo Ovalle he stated that he has had experience in various places to be able to validate the title: “I had training stays in the first lung transplant center in Latin America in Puerto Alegre, Brazil. I was in the second lung transplant center in Leuven, Belgium; and the first center of that specialty in Vienna, Austria. I have a record of 1,400 surgeries, more than 100 lung extractions and participation in almost 100 lung transplants, as the first surgeon or assistant, ”said Ovalle during his strike.

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