Senator Ishaq Dar, the chairman of the committee formed by the Punjab government to finalise a new service structure for doctors, has directed the Health Department and the Finance Department to calculate the cost of giving promotions to grade 18 to all doctors with specialties.
The senator gave the instructions at a meeting with doctors’ representatives at the Chief Minister’s Secretariat, participants of the meeting told The Express Tribune.
Dar directed the finance and health secretaries to calculate how many senior registrar posts (which are in grade 18) would be required if all doctors with specialties (FCPS, MD and MS) were promoted, as well as the cost. “He also directed them to calculate the financial impact of other allowances on which there has been agreement,” Medical Teachers Association Secretary General Dr Abrar Ashraf Ali told The Tribune after the meeting.
Representatives of the Young Doctors Association (YDA) Punjab and the Pakistan Medical Association (PMA) also attended.
YDA representative Dr Amir Bandesha said that some things agreed upon at previous meetings had been removed from the draft agreement presented on Saturday.
“They had earlier agreed to treat senior registrars like assistant professors and to give them letters of experience as assistant professors if they sought to go abroad. The current draft mentions no such thing. We pointed this out to Senator Dar and he directed the officials concerned to look into it,” he said.
Dr Bandesha said that by the YDA’s reckoning, there were 440 doctors in grade 17 who would be promoted to grade 18 as senior registrars. He said the government had previously agreed that for doctors hired on contract and later given regular jobs, the time they had served on contract would be included when considering promotions.
“The current draft only states that doctors in teaching cadres will be treated this way,” he said. “I think this is because there are 500 to 600 such doctors in the teaching cadre, and around 5,000 in the general cadre. We told them that there should be a uniform policy for all doctors.”
YDA Jinnah Hospital President Dr Javaid Aheer said the association had also conveyed to the government that it would not sign any agreement until a murder case, registered against YDA doctors over the death of a child due to alleged medical malpractice during the doctors’ strike earlier this year, was dropped.
Senator Dar asked the health secretary and Khawaja Salman Rafique, the chief minister’s special adviser on health, to meet with the doctors’ representatives next week to finalise the draft agreement, Dr Bandesha said. Rafique said the next meeting would be held in a few days. He said that the two sides had reached agreement on most points and Dar had asked them to resolve the remaining issues as soon as possible.
Published in The Express Tribune, September 30th, 2012.
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