The Health Minister and medical unions failed to reach an agreement on the new pay scale this Thursday, but have already scheduled a new meeting for next Friday. The main element dividing the parties is the 40-hour workweek, which the government intends to maintain in order to qualify for the roughly 30% increase demanded by unions. “Doctors are the only professional group that works in the SNS for 40 hours; they need to work only 35. This is a mistake, as a result of which there will be fewer and fewer doctors in the SNS,” it was said at the end of the three-day meeting. hour-long meeting, Jorge Roque da Cunha, from the Independent Union of Doctors.
Joana Bordalo e Sa from the National Federation of Doctors stressed that doctors “don’t want to live off supplements.” “What doctors want – and this is the most important thing – is for us to restore the 35-hour week. There was nothing new about it,” he said. Health Minister Manuel Pizarro said that “doctors and the Portuguese are well aware of the scale of what we are proposing,” stressing that “the meeting was indeed very positive in terms of the progress that could be made.”
DETAILS
250 hours
The proposal “retains 250 hours of overtime per year at full commitment, beyond what is required by law,” FNAM warns.
€7300 top
Under the new full commitment regime proposed by the Ministry of Health, a doctor at the peak of his career can earn €7,300 gross.
advanced mode
The government has extended the full commitment regime to public health doctors, but with increased activity and additional work.
