Prague, Jan 4 (CTK) – A roughly 10 percent annual pay rise over a few next years is the sole instrument of stopping the departures of hospital doctors and nurses abroad, the Association of Bohemian and Moravian Hospitals (ACMN) says on its web page.
The pay rise would require an annual 6 percent increase in the sums health insurance companies pay to hospitals for treatments, the ACMN says.
It says this is an opinion of all hospital associations and representatives of state, regional and private hospitals.
The trade unions also demand higher salaries and they say the 5 percent increase as from January 1, 2016 is insufficient.
Health Minister Svatopluk Nemecek says the ministry does not have money for the demanded pay rise.
The ACMN says hospitals would need some three billion crowns for a 10 percent pay rise.
The emergency committee of hospitals, trade unions and patients says the money is available in the health care system due to a higher collection of health insurance that amounts to one billion crowns monthly.
“The ACMN and other associations of hospitals have permanently alerted to the worsening personnel situation in hospitals, which restricts their work and threatens the care of patients,” the ACMN writes.
It writes that some hospitals close down internal medicine wards, without which no hospital can exist in the long term.
The ACMN says the major cause of the situation are low payments by health insurance companies that have been frozen also nominally since 2008.
The real wages have been restricted by accumulated inflation that has climbed up to almost 20 percent during the period under survey. The hospitals have also been heavily hit by the repeated raising of VAT and the factual devaluation of the crown performed by the CNB central bank.
($1=24.824 crowns)
