Hospital doctors, Treasury clash over long hours, budgets

Hadassah Medical Organization Director-General Ze’ev Rothstein asked for injunction order late Wednesday night to stop a strike the IMA threatened a day earlier.

The Israel Medical Association’s proposed 24-hour warning strike on Thursday would put the public general, psychiatric, geriatric and rehabilitation hospitals around the country on a much-reduced Shabbat schedule.

All the public hospitals will run according to a reduced Shabbat schedule, with only urgent dialysis, intensive care, emergency departments, delivery rooms, cancer wards and post-natal intensive care units working normally. A special IMA exceptions committee will decide whether to give in-vitro fertilization treatments in specific cases.

Even though the Health and Finance Ministry have canceled plans to prohibit hospital department heads from doing private work – to which the IMA strongly objected, the doctors pulled out other reasons for their strike, which would be its first work action since it signed a new contract with the employers exactly five years ago at the end of a long doctor’s strike.

A strike would also be a significant immediate loss of funds to the Treasury, however, as one day without outpatient clinics and diagnostic institutes being open means that government hospitals will go without that income.

Doctors made it clear they would not to walk off completely but they also said they would refuse to carry out anything but emergency procedures, and there will be fewer of them on the wards in public general, psychiatric, geriatric and rehabilitation hospitals – those owned and run by the Health Ministry, as well as those run by Clalit Health Services and voluntary hospitals (except Laniado, in Netanya, which put a no-strike clause in all workers’ contracts).

IMA chairman Dr. Leonid Eidelman accused the Treasury of “harming our ability to treat patients and its proposed Arrangements Bill tighten the noose on our throat.” He demanded that all the bill’s sections that would affect the health system be canceled and that the government hold negotiations on any changes it wants to carry out, as well as regarding job slots and budgets. Other reasons given are the lack of enough doctors on the job, the burden of long hours, especially on young residents learning a specialty, is worse than ever. The IMA also came out in opposition to the Treasury proposal to “significantly punish” through fines those hospital directors who do not meet budgetary targets.

Hospitals will be penalized by not getting development funds and money to cover the costs of drugs for patients, he added. “This is so even though the hospital and health fund budgets are inadequate to provide 21st-century medicine to the population,” he added.

As of press time, there was no decision on whether there would be a strike in the hospitals. For up to date information visit www. jpost.com.