June 11th, 2016
Papers on both the left and the right welcome a pay rise deal struck by the government, health care trade unions and professional chambers.
In Magyar Idők, Éva Haiman welcomes the government’s decision to spend 100 billion forints over two years on raising the wages of doctors and health care assistants: doctors will earn an additional 200.000 forints on a monthly basis, while health care assistant wages will almost double by 2019, compared their earnings in 2012. The government has understood, she writes, that the 500 billion forints it has spent in the last couple of years to renovate hospitals and health care centres is of no use if there will be no one to heal in them. The author admits that current wages in the health care sector are lower not only than in the West, but even than the average in the neighbouring (former communist) countries. Haiman acknowledges that health care workers leaving the country for better pay in western Europe pose a grave danger to the sector.
While advocacy groups were trying to exert pressure on the streets and on the internet, the government struck a wage deal with quieter and more loyal trade unions and trade chambers, Anna Danó comments in Népszabadság. Though minor trade unions left out of the deal are now less satisfied, she believes these pay-rises are indeed significant, even if they does not reach the level which RESZASZ, a professional group representing young doctors say would be enough to make specialists and senior physicians stay. However, Danó warns, pay rises will elude many in the sector and will not heal other acute problems that also make health care workers flee the country, like bad working conditions, lack of equipment, missing funds, unpredictability, and an anachronistic hierarchy.
Tags: health care, pay hikes
