CAIRO: The Ministry of Health has released details of new pay scales for doctors working within the ministry. According to the website of the Doctors' Syndicate, the new pay scales are time-tabled for implementation between August and October 2008. Under the changes, interning doctors or general practitioners in the public health sector will receive LE 656 per month while those involved in preventative treatment will be paid LE 856. Resident doctors will receive LE 1,281 or LE 1,476 depending on whether they are in the preventative or curative sector, respectively, and will be obliged to work 12 shifts per month. Emergency specialist doctors will receive LE 3,772 per month under the changes. The syndicate says that starting November 2008, pay will be linked to performance. Doctors will receive 70 percent of the scheduled amounts as a base salary, with the remaining 30 percent linked to performance. "The syndicate has requested that performance-linking be implemented according to clear and defined rules, the statement on the syndicate's website reads. "Performance-linking must not be used as a means of stripping financial reform of its meaning, as was the case with the masters' degrees and doctorate raises: the syndicate has proposed that rather than being deprived of incentive payments, doctors should be subjected to a disciplinary investigation [in cases of malpractice]. Currently, doctors' starting salaries are as low as LE 200 per month.They say that bureaucratic inefficiency and subjective management decisions mean that they are often denied incentive and other payments which supplement their basic salaries. It is for this reason that lobby group Doctors Without Rights have continuously called for a fixed, basic salary of LE 1,000. Last week, the Ministry of Health announced that LE 400 million will be allotted to doctors' salaries during the current fiscal year. Egyptian news website Masrawy.com quoted Minister of Health Hatem El-Gabaly as saying that the average salary of doctors will increase from LE 700 to LE 1,379 per month. Doctors Without Rights expressed skepticism about this announcement. Dr Mona Mina told Daily News Egypt last week that "there are some 100,000 doctors employed by the Ministry of Health, which means that LE 80 million per month will be needed to fund the increases. This is much less than the amount the government has pledged. For its part, Doctors Without Rights on Tuesday again called on the syndicate or the Ministry of Health to reveal the details, number and issue date of the ministerial decree increasing doctors' wages. On its website, the group also calls on doctors who do not receive the increases to notify it "in order to allow [Doctors Without Rights] to gauge the reality of what we have received.
