The Egyptian Medical Syndicate (EMS) has decided to put off demanding higher salaries for doctors until the Prime Minister's visit to the EMS on Doctors Day (March 18). At a meeting with the board of directors of the medical sub-syndicates on Friday, the EMS deplored the fact that the disbursement of incentives had not been extended to all doctors and had indeed been halted in some governorates. The EMS criticized the delay in disbursing master's incentives, too. The EMS also decided to study the possibility of lodging a lawsuit against the decision not to put together the incentives of localities and those for doctors. The EMS called for quickly enacting the executive regulations implementing the law on medical facilities and for giving five more years to regularize one's condition, as the current deadline is due to expire next June. Some attendees proposed to go on strike so that doctors could get their rights, especially after pharmacists and truck drivers had got theirs after using this "effective weapon", as they described it. The EMS decided to form a syndicate committee to express its opinion regarding the articles of the law on medical facilities. The syndicate also condemned the campaign to manage free treatment in private medical centers and hospitals in Aswan. It also slammed their request for very expensive devices, such as one to analyze CO2, although they just perform small or medium operations. The meeting also demanded to stop such provocative campaigns which hamper doctors' work for the people. Hamdy el-Sayyed reviewed his meeting with Prime Minister Ahmed Nazif last Monday. He pointed out that Nazif said the government would back doctors and implement the agreed-upon incentive program. However, he affirmed that such incentives might be distributed over three years rather than two due to the economic crisis. According to El-Sayed, Nazif said he would ask Higher Education Minister Hany Helal to put doctors in universities on the same footing as their colleagues working in Health Ministry hospitals and to pay them the 300% incentive issued through the health minister's decrees (from No. 318 to No. 323 of 2008). The head of Dakahlia Medical Syndicate, Dr. Abdel Moniem Eid, said some doctors have not received the master's incentive so far in spite of the Prime Minister's decree No. 734 of 2005. He explained that the doctors in specialized centers affiliated to the Ministry of Health General Secretariat have not been paid their incentives yet. The secretary general of Qalyubia Medical Syndicate, Dr. Magdy Khoroub, deplored the Health Ministry's backtrack and its halting the disbursement of incentives to the doctors in some governorates from February 1. He also criticized the tendency to link this incentive to an assessment of performance in the near future. The Secretary General of Cairo Syndicate, Dr. Saad Zaghloul, said it was important for doctors working outside the Ministry of Health to get the incentives as their colleagues at the Ministry had. He called for doctors in all hospitals and health authorities across Egypt to be put on an equal footing. EMS Cashier, Dr. Essam el-Aryan, called for organizing brainstorming sessions in the governorates. He also urged sub-syndicates to put forward specific proposals in order to enact a unified law on medical professions which might include the law on exercising the profession, the law on medical facilities, the bill on sustainable professional development, the law on psychiatry, the law on organ transplant, and the bill to set up a national authority for medical specializations similar to the unified law on pharmacy.
