'This is a crisis'
by Medical Intern
2009-07-03 07:45
I am a junior doctor in my first year of internship. My basic salary is less than that of a senior bus driver. I have a degree in medicine and surgery. He has a driver's licence. The health minister's secretary is paid more than me. I did a six-year degree to get my MBChB. She did a two-month course in typing.
However, I am still willing to concede that as a junior, it is acceptable to be paid less. What is not acceptable is that the professors who taught me, doctors with whole walls of degrees, are paid a pittance.
The medical officers, who run many of the smaller hospitals in this country, are not paid a fair salary. The trainee specialists, who are scarce skills, earn meagre wages.
The stand taken by South African doctors in recent weeks has been a long time coming. The healthcare system is on the brink of collapse, doctors are leaving in droves, and the government has quietly swept healthcare under the carpet for the last ten years. The gross under-compensation of the nation's healthcare workers is only one of the many problems in this system.
Doctors are professionals - reasonable individuals, who have resorted to mass industrial action out of sheer desperation. These people, who continue to serve the South African people despite being overworked, underpaid and underappreciated, despite compromising their families, their financial security and sometimes their own health and happiness, did not ask the government for hugely inflated salary increases.
They asked only for what is fair: that doctors working in the public sector get paid the same salary as other professionals in this sector. Fifty percent may sound like a large increase, but this figure would merely put a doctor in line with his colleagues in public sector law or accounting.
What has been offered is yet another pittance, with increases ranging between one percent for senior specialists, and 40% for interns. What this effectively means is that some doctors will receive an increase that does not even meet inflation.
The Occupations Specific Dispensation was designed to retain doctors in the public sector. For those of us that doubted that that would ever be an option, this debacle has only served to confirm that it will indeed never be an option.
The government of South Africa is never going to take healthcare seriously, it is never going to recognise that doctors are a precious resource to be respected and looked after, and as a result, it will lose this resource - to the private sector, to other countries which treat and remunerate doctors as professionals, and to other fields, where qualifications and experience are recognised.
A crucial opportunity for this government to make a statement about the importance of healthcare, by affording doctors the recognition they deserve, has fallen by the wayside, and the continued deterioration of our healthcare system will be the inevitable consequence.
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