After five umbrella medical associations recently announced a protest rally for March 18, the health ministry has convened a meeting with disgruntled physicians for Friday to discuss everything that is bothering them. Pročitaj više

Last Monday, representatives of the five associations said that the decision on the protest rally was made after a survey, conducted in 2022, showed great dissatisfaction among the doctors in Croatia.

The survey was conducted among 14,000 members of those associations, and, 5,700 of them responded to it, with the lions’s share (97%) of those respondents expressing dissatisfaction with their labour status. Furthermore, 94% of those who answered the survey said that they were in favour of protest action.

Health Minister Vili Beros said last Monday that the displeasure with the status of doctor in the healthcare system should not be used for raising one’s media visibility and that dialogue was the only way to find adequate solutions.

The five umbrella medical associations want the job complexity indices for specialists to be made equal to those of subspecialists and those of doctors in primary health care to be made the same as those of hospital doctors, as well as an increase of at least 10% for doctors undergoing specialist training.

They want a law on the labour status of doctors to be adopted by the end of the spring session of the parliament, the work of doctors at all levels of health care to be aligned with time and personnel standards, and the abolishment of current specialisation contracts which they consider very unfavourable for doctors.

Beros said on Tuesday that work was ongoing to equalise the coefficients of hospital doctors and those working in primary healthcare. He said that 2,492 doctors and 2,914 nurses had been hired in the public healthcare system between 2016 and 2022, concerning the topic of shortage of labour.