Unions warn pay increases for regular doctors are causing unrest

Medical unions warned this Thursday that a 40% increase in payments to doctors providing services would worsen the already existing imbalance between the salaries of specialists and NHS workers and create discomfort.

According to the devolution order published this month in the Diário da República, the highest authorities of institutions and services integrated into the National Health Service may, “in duly justified exceptional situations,” apply payment at a higher cost per hour than expected. up to a limit of 40%.

The National Federation of Doctors (FNAM) in a statement warns that the increase “reinforces the imbalance that already exists between the salaries of SNS doctors and service providers”, will discourage the retention of doctors in the SNS and encourage the migration of specialists from one regime to another, which is detrimental to services public health and ability to respond to population needs.

In a conversation with Lusa, the secretary general of the Independent Union of Doctors (SIM), Nuno Rodrigues, also criticized this measure, believing that it would create discomfort among specialists.

“In fact, such an opportunity already existed. In this case, we’re talking about expediting local health departments (ULS) so they can get that approval faster. The problem remains an issue of equality,” he stressed. .

According to Nuno Rodriguez, it is unacceptable that two doctors work “side by side”: one has an employment contract with SNS and the other is a service provider, and that one receives more than 70 euros per hour and the other for example, a medical assistant at the beginning throughout his career he received 18.93 euros per hour.

If professionals who had been waiting a month and a half for the NHS job competition to open were to see the hourly rate currently on offer in medical careers and the hourly rate for service providers, “they would start to think maybe it really isn’t worth it.” stay on social networks,” he explained.

The union leader says the government needs to send a “strong signal at the next negotiations meeting that it wants to make structural changes” not just to wages, but also to the speed of competition, the difficulty and the number of emergency hours doctors have to carry out each week.

The FNAM statement added that while the contingency plan for the summer has not yet been made public, “much less for the winter,” the government’s decision “suggests a continuation of the patchwork policy.”

Thus, rather than presenting “strategic and future solutions to retain doctors in the SNS,” the executive branch only contributes to “accentuating the structural problems of the SNS,” FNAM said.

For the federation, an increase in the hourly rate paid to service providers leads to increased outsourcing of services that the SNS should be able to guarantee, “and an increase in this share is a clear invitation to doctors, poorly paid and under working conditions, to exchange their place in the SNS for the provision of services.”

It also highlights that the policy has “well-established evidence in the medical field”, such as “broken and unstructured teams”, “imbalance between professionals who receive very different values ​​for the same work” and “lack of capacity and predictability in building scales that, despite rising costs, will deprive the NHS of doctors.”