Prague, Sept 17 (CTK) – Doctors and other health workers will see their pay rise by the previously envisaged 5 percent as from January 2016, since the unions failed to push through a higher pay rise at a meeting with PM Bohuslav Sobotka and Health Minister Svatopluk Nemecek (both Social Democrats, CSSD) today.
Nemecek said the sum the state will pay to health insurers for selected groups of people, including children, students, pensioners and the disabled, does not make a steeper pay rise possible.
A steeper rise would endanger the stability of the health insurance system, Nemecek said.
The unions unsuccessfully demanded a 10-percent pay rise for the hospital staff.
Dagmar Zitnikova, chairwoman of the Health and Social Care Workers’ Union, said the rejection of the unions’ demand by Sobotka and Nemecek may cause the staff to leave Czech hospitals.
She pointed to Slovakia’s decision to raise the monthly pay of nurses by 17 percent, i.e. 200 to 300 euros, as from next year.
The Slovak nurses in Czech hospitals will probably return to their homeland, Zitnikova warned.
She said no protest events are needed as the Czech health sector will collapse spontaneously.
“We are really afraid that the provided health care might be sharply reduced and its quality might worsen,” Zitnikova told journalists.
Some hospitals might be closed down, she said.
Disappointment at the meeting’s result has also been voiced by Doctors’ Trade Union (LOK) chairman Martin Engel.
He said the situation is serious and the country is threatened with health care outages.
The raising of the health staff’s base pay by 10 percent would cost the state seven billion crowns.
The state wants to use the 1.8-billion increase in the fees the state pays to health insurers to raise health care workers’ pay, and also the 1.5 billion crowns by which the Health Ministry’s budget is to be increased next year.
All this, however, can raise the wages by 5 percent only.
The health staff’s base pay rose by 5 percent as from January 2015. Their real wages rose even more, by an average 6 and 9 percent in the case of nurses and doctors, respectively, in the first half of the year.
($1=24.096 crowns)
