Prague, Sept 22 (CTK) – The extraordinary congress of the Czech Doctors’ Chamber (CLK) approved yesterday demands to improve the situation in health care, including more money in the system and its fairer distribution, a reform of the education of doctors and nurses, and their better remuneration.
The 300 delegates said health care is not a priority of the current coalition government if only Health Minister Svatopluk Nemecek (Social Democrats, CSSD) accepted the invitation to attend the congress.
In addition, Nemecek only stayed one hour at the congress.
He said a number of groupings escalate their demands before the October regional and Senate elections.
“I consider this a mistake,” he said and added that doctors should not be complaining all the time, even if they get more money.
The salaries of doctors and nurses are to be raised by 10 percent as from January 2017.
“We depend on the public’s support. If we lose it, there will be no one to back us,” Nemecek, a doctor by profession, said.
He said Bohuslav Sobotka’s (CSSD) government has been working on the problems of health care but it cannot resolve the problems which should have started to be solved 15 or 20 years ago.
CLK President Milan Kubek said “five problems must be solved. If one of them is left out, the construction will not work. It is necessary to raise spending on health care, secure fairness in payments for healthcare services, raise medical workers’ incomes, reform education and secure independent control.”
The CLK wants the health insurance the state pays for children, pensioners, the disabled and the unemployed to be regularly indexed until they reach 50 percent of the average pay.
The government has approved a 3.6 billion crown increase in the state’s insurance payments as from 2017.
Nemecek promised yesterday to push through regular indexation.
However, Finance Minister Andrej Babis (ANO) does not agree with this. The government interrupted the debate on Nemecek’s proposal at the end of August.
The CLK says the introduction of a health tax on tobacco and alcohol would bring more money into the system.
The doctors also propose that additional commercial insurance be introduced that would be exclusively in the hands of health insurance companies.
The doctors want all insurers to pay the same fees for identical treatments.
They also call for amending the Labour Code that would unite the rules of remuneration of employees of public healthcare facilities and they insist on the observance of the limits of extra time work according to the code.
Now, doctors commonly do more extra time than embedded in the Labour Code.
Kubek said the CLK is opposed to the duty of graduates to undergo a five-year study programme in hospitals and it is also opposed to the extension of specialist training.
The CLK would like to have the power to control how individual healthcare facilities are staffed.
Nemecek told the congress, however, the demand is unrealistic.
“The idea that the state will give the CLK the control powers is not real,” Nemecek said.
The CLK would also like to have the right to suspend a doctor working under the influence of alcohol from providing medical services.
CLK membership is compulsory for doctors.
The congress said the price of work of all medical workers in the list of medical treatments to be valid as from 2017 should be raised by 10 percent compared to this year.
The CLK, which has about 52,200 members in the Czech Republic with a population of 10.5 million, has long claimed that health care is underfinanced and that there is a shortage of qualified staff.
Kubek said that based on publicly available advertisements, hospitals were about 1000 doctors short in March. He added that doctors are ageing and that every fourth is older than 60 years.
According to the CLK, 350 to 400 doctors leave for other countries annually. About 1270 Czech doctors work in Britain, another 1000 in Germany where they have better work conditions and higher salaries, the CLK says.
On the other hand, more foreign doctors, mainly from Slovakia, Ukraine and Russia, are coming to the Czech Republic.
($1=24.232 crowns)
