Government trying to cheat doctors

None of the junior doctors is averse to one year of rural service if it is treated as service and they are given full pay of Rs. 18,000 per month for Medical Officers, which is likely to go up to Rs.22,000 soon. It is not only the monetary loss, but the loss of hundreds of Medical Officer posts that has made them adamant in protesting against the government proposal to extend their internship by a year.

“The government is trying to cheat the entire doctors’ community by snatching away our posts in the rural areas surreptitiously by extending our study period by one year beyond five-and-a-half years. It proposes to exploit us for one year giving only Rs. 8,000 as stipend, which was not commensurate with salaries drawn by people in other professions of equal intelligence,” according to Guntur Government General Hospital House Surgeons Association general secretary Aswani Kumar.

The other major lacuna in the system they point out is slow shift of students’ preference from biological sciences to mathematics and physics.

Junior doctors question the government’s indecision in filling 969 posts for which they had advertised, though 4,000 candidates had applied.

This indicates MBBS graduates were ready to work in the rural areas, but the government was going back on providing facilities and appointing proper doctors, he opines.

“This rural service is only a ploy to abolish the Medical Officer jobs and even if we are posted what kind of training/experience the government expects us to gain when majority of 30,000 PHCs in the country were ill-equipped or unmanned?” they ask.

Junior doctors want the Government to give the degree certificate after five-and-a-half years and then appoint them in rural PHC to which they were agreeable and also another aspect they wanted clarification was on counting this for admission into the PG courses.

Currently three years of rural service or two years of tribal area service is counted for PG admissions for priority, they observed.

Union Health Minister’s recent statement was heartening though for the junior doctors as he had announced that one year extension rural service would be made optional.

RAMESH SUSARLA

in Guntur