Prague, March 20 (CTK) – The salaries of Czech doctors and nurses should rise next year more than by 5 percent as this year, Czech PM Bohuslav Sobotka said in the Questions of Vaclav Moravec discussion programme on public Czech Television (CT) on Sunday.
Sobotka (Social Democrats, CSSD) justified a steeper rise in the health personnel’s pay by their frequent departures abroad.
A total of 41,700 active doctors are in the register of the Doctors’ Chamber (CLK), more than 2300 of them work abroad.
Hospitals seek about 1000 doctors via advertisements. According to the CLK, hospitals would have to admit about 3000 of them if they were to observe the Labour Code and meet the legal number of overtime hours.
Sobotka would like to solve the problem with the lack of health care personnel by a reform of the system of doctors and nurses’ education.
“It is not absolutely necessary for a general nurse to have a university education,” Sobotka said.
The reform is to bring more new nurses to the Czech health care system. The rules of doctors’ qualification and education are also changing, he added.
The trade unions, hospitals, the CLK and patients called on the government on Friday to send much more money to health care and raise salaries in the sector by one third within three years and by another 10 percent every year.
At their meeting with Health Minister Svatopluk Nemecek ( CSSD), they supported his proposal to raise the state health insurance payments for children, students, the unemployed and pensioners, which would bring ten billion crowns to the health care system every year.
Nemecek said he would submit the proposal for increasing the payments for the state insured within three weeks.
The state pays health insurance for six million people and the per capita sum is 870 crowns. Nemecek did not say how much it would rise.
According to the unions and employers, the state should pay at least 1337 crowns a month per capita.
Finance Minister Andrej Babis (ANO) has repeatedly challenged the demand for higher state health insurance payments. He says there are “black holes” in the health care system and that sources should be sought within it.
