Prague, Sept 13 (CTK) – The Czech Association of Hospitals, which brings together teaching hospitals and dozens of other medical facilities across the country, rejects some arguments with which general practitioners justify the protest closure of their surgeries on September 21, it told CTK yesterday.
The association said the major personnel problems are in hospital facilities whose staff are often overburdened. In addition, hospitals often have to stand in for the GPs’ work.
The GPs said on Monday that their protest is to alert to long-time problems in primary care for adults, insufficient payments and low competences.
The GPs object to that hospitals will get money for a 10 percent pay rise next year, while the out-patient surgeries will get nothing.
The Monday decision on the form of the protest can still be reversed in the Thursday negotiations with the deputy health minister who is preparing a new decree on payments for treatments next year.
Jaroslava Kunova, chairwoman of the Association of Hospitals, said inpatient care facilities have had to cope with medical staff’s departures for several years.
She said mainly during holidays as well as in afternoon hours during the year, at the weekends and on national holidays, when the GPs’ surgeries do not work, hospitals have to accept patients with even banal health conditions.
“This leads to a situation where the medical staff in hospitals consider the round-the-clock operation less and less attractive, and if possible, they prefer less demanding medical work (single shift operation), departure abroad, or they change their profession,” Kunova said.
ms/dr/rtj
