'Let us have a raise in salary'
As I am sure many of you are aware, we Jews believe that Simana Miltha Hee (a sign is meaningful) and therefore on Rosh HaShanna we eat things like the head of a fish (so that we will be the head and not the tail), pomegranates (so that we will have merits like the seeds of a pomegranate), fish (so that we will be fruitful and multiply like fish) etc. In our house, we joke about two other signs: We eat meat so that God should bring us good tidings (the word for meat in Hebrew is basar and the word for bringing tidings is l'vaseir) and we eat lettuce, raisins and celery and say 'let us have a raise in salary.'
Israel's medical residents must have eaten a lot of lettuce, raisins and celery two weeks ago and apparently it is going to
pay off. Prime Minister Netanyahu has ordered that they be given a raise in salary.
Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu on Monday instructed Finance Ministry representatives involved in negotiations with medical residents to grant young doctors working solely in the public sector a salary hike of thousands of shekels.
The Prime Minister's Office added in a statement that Netanyahu was continuing his efforts to improve conditions for medical residents who have turned in resignation letters as part of a labor dispute.
Earlier on Monday, Netanyahu summoned Finance Minister Yuval Steinitz and Deputy Health Minister Ya'acov Litzman for an emergency meeting regarding the mass resignation of medical residents earlier in the day. Litzman said they hoped to reach a solution in a short period of time, Army Radio reported.
The state also sought an injunction from the National Labor Court Monday afternoon that would order medical residents to return to work. Several hundred medical residents resigned and did not show up for work Monday morning as part of a labor dispute in the health system.
Following the mass resignation, Steinitz called on the residents to return to work. "We all need to respect the law and the rule of law," Steinitz said in a statement, urging the medical residents to "hold discussions with us. We are looking for creative ways to improve certain things within the already-written agreement with doctors, including additional money."
The government was also considering ordering a transfer of more senior doctors to departments where the residents' absence has created backups. Attorney-General Yehuda Weinstein already signed off on such a process, which still needs to be authorized by the director-general of the Health Ministry, Army Radio reported.
I believe it's more important to the public that the young doctors stop working 36-hour shifts. I sleep very little, but I don't make life and death decisions, and I don't see how anyone who has worked 24 hours straight - let alone 36 - can make those decisions (for the record, my record for consecutive hours worked is 42 and after that stretch I would not have trusted myself to make any life and death decisions).
But yes, they are also grossly underpaid. In this country, staj (apprenticeship) is common in many - nearly all - professions. It's slave labor. (When I did staj as a lawyer here, after working for seven years in the US, I was paid $1,000 per month and when I did a $42 million stock offering in the US while I was doing staj - for which my boss was paid $125,000 - he gave me a $400 bonus. No, I am not exaggerating). For the doctors it just goes on much longer.
Labels: Israeli medical care, medical residents
Medical residents resign, ignoring Netanyahu request for 2 more weeks
For the last several months, Israel's doctors and hospitals have been carrying out labor sanctions. The real underlying issue - which is not being addressed - is the over-involvement of government in the medical system. We saw
one result of that in a post that I did on Sunday.
About a month ago, the government reached a settlement with the doctors' union. The doctors - who are so underpaid that in some cities they are allowed to make up for it by seeing patients privately on hospital grounds (known as
sharap here in Jerusalem where it exists) - agreed to a settlement that granted them a substantial raise. But the settlement left the medical residents in no better position than they were before. Medical residents here are grossly underpaid (I heard a doctor last week say that his monthly income came to about NIS 7,500 for which he would work 330-350 hours) and they felt that the more senior doctors were not representing their interests. They submitted a mass resignation letter, which was voided by the Labor court. They then submitted individual resignation letters which were to take effect on October 4. That date was postponed several times by the Labor court to today. Today, hundreds of young medical residents have resigned,
despite an appeal from Prime Minister Netanyahu - who out of fear of the precedent it will set has tried to leave the matter to his surrogates - to delay their resignations for two weeks so that he may become involved.
According to Army Radio, a total of 260 residents did not show up for their morning shifts: 104 at Ichilov Hospital at Sourasky Medical Center, 71 at Meir Medical Center in Kfar Saba, 77 at Rambam Medical Center [out of 110 according to Israel Radio. CiJ] and eight at Bnai Zion Hospital.
Following the failure of the negotiations to produce a solution to the labor dispute, the sides had been expected to meet at the National Labor Court on Monday, where the state will likely request an injunction be issued against the resignations.
Thus far, the National Labor Court has declined to let residents resign over what they claim are unfair conditions agreed upon in the Israel Medical Association’s nine-year labor agreement with the employers, which was signed at the end of August.
After walking out on the talks with the Finance Ministry, the medical residents' representatives expressed frustration with the Treasury's "failure to understand the reality of the situation" and called on Netanyahu to intervene.
Without a compromise, all the sides have much to lose, as the physicians would not be given their jobs back once they carried out their threats to leave, and the Health Ministry desperately looked for other doctors to fill their places.
But there was a big surprise this morning. The government hospitals assumed that they could at least cover for the absence of the residents with senior doctors, but the senior doctors' union announced this morning that they would not cover. And just to sweeten the pie, the medical students announced that they will not start school on October 23 unless this is resolved. That would mean a delay in the readiness of the next rounds of medical residents to take their positions.
Doctors here are grossly underpaid. On the other hand, limiting services to emergency cases (and I'm not even sure there are enough doctors to provide those except in the short term) is likely to turn a lot more patients into emergency cases, or worse. Doctors shouldn't be on strike. They also shouldn't be treated like sanitation workers or baggage handlers.
Unfortunately, the real solution - getting the government out of the business of negotiating with the doctors and allowing the free market to work - cannot be implemented quickly enough. It's going to take a lot of goodwill - which is currently lacking - from all sides to make the system work.
Some of you might be wondering who the Minister of Health is. There isn't one. As I have mentioned once or twice before, ministries are handed out to political parties based on who needs to be in the coalition, and ministers don't necessarily know anything about the particular ministry in which they work. The Health Ministry is run by Deputy Minister Yaakov Litzman who - as part of the coalition agreement - has no minister above him (Litzman is from United Torah Judaism, which in principal takes only deputy ministries and the chairmanship of the Knesset Finance Committee). Would things be different if there were a medical professional in charge of the Health Ministry? Possibly, but I have my doubts. In any event, we have heard much less from Litzman in this crisis than we have from the doctors, the finance ministry and the Prime Minister's office.
So if you're in Israel, please try to stay healthy. And if you're a doctor living abroad who has dreamed of making aliya, this might be your time to try to cut a deal.
Labels: Binyamin Netanyahu, doctors' strike, Israeli medical care, medical residents, Yaakov Litzman
As I am sure many of you are aware, we Jews believe that Simana Miltha Hee (a sign is meaningful) and therefore on Rosh HaShanna we eat things like the head of a fish (so that we will be the head and not the tail), pomegranates (so that we will have merits like the seeds of a pomegranate), fish (so that we will be fruitful and multiply like fish) etc. In our house, we joke about two other signs: We eat meat so that God should bring us good tidings (the word for meat in Hebrew is basar and the word for bringing tidings is l'vaseir) and we eat lettuce, raisins and celery and say 'let us have a raise in salary.'
