Service structure: Govt shrugs at YDA’s call for protest

‘A promotion committee will decide the matter in January’

LAHORE:

Though the Young Doctors Association is welcome to talk, there is little the government can offer it in terms of service structure reform, officials of the Health Department have said.

Ikhlaq Ali Khan, spokesperson for the department, said that the Heath Department was going to hold a departmental promotion committee (DPC) meeting on January 15 to look into promotion of doctors. He said they had also requested the Finance Department to create 8,000 new posts.

The YDA has announced province-wide protests from December 16 to January 17. Young Doctors will organise demonstrations and hold seminars in hospitals in Lahore, Multan, Faisalabad, Rawalpindi, Dera Ghazi Khan, Bahawalpur and Gujrat. They will press the government to implement a service structure for doctors, the association has announced.



YDA Punjab Spokesperson Khurram Shehzad said the government had agreed to a 52-point agreement on November 7, 2012, to promote 4,000 doctors to grade 18. In December 2014, hundreds of doctors have become eligible for promotion, he said. However, only 500 doctors have been promoted so far, Shehzad said.

He said they expected only a few hundred doctors to be promoted in the upcoming DPC in January. Withholding promotions blocks the way for induction of new doctors, he said. “Promoting a few hundred doctors will not address the issue at hand. We have no option but to protest,” he said.

Khan said that at a high-level meeting held last week, the YDA had expressed satisfaction with the upcoming DPC. He said the department was doing its best to facilitate doctors and the officials were willing to hold talks with them.

Department officials said that the YDA had been informed that the government was taking fast-track measures to implement the agreed service structure for them. “The government has nothing more to offer.”

Health Director General Zahid Pervez said they will hold a meeting with YDA officials regarding the protests soon. He said that he did not understand why the YDA was planning the protests, “they have already been informed of the promotion structure”.

He said the department had announced promotions of doctors according to the criteria. When asked how many doctors would be promoted, he said no quota had been set so far. “All those eligible will be promoted.” He said the YDA’s demands could not be fulfilled over night. He said the promotion of all eligible doctors would take at least two or three years.

Published in The Express Tribune, December 13^th, 2014.