PESHAWAR, May 8: The Provincial Doctors Association has threatened to observe province-wide strike if government didn’t accept their demands within one week.

Speaking at a news conference here on Monday, Dr Abdul Qadir, president of the association, demanded of the government to provide them with service structure, accommodation and scholarship facilities.

He said that the former caretaker chief minister had approved that 500 reserved seats of doctors would be created and they would perform duties on the places of the doctors going for training and leave. However, he said that the bureaucracy was creating hindrances in implementation of the directives.

He said that most of the doctors wanting to do specialisation in other province were denied leave on the plea that they should first provide their substitutes before being issued no objection certificates (NoCs).

He said that they didn’t accept the four tiers formula under which they had to wait for 22 years for promotion to BPS-18. “Recently the government deceived us by promoting 200 doctors instead of 480 to BPS-18 under the formula,” he added.

Dr Qadir expressed concern over the non-availability of scholarships and said that they should be awarded free scholarships like other provinces for specialisation. The accommodation problem of doctors had become extremely chronic, he said.

He added that the government had rented a 27-room hotel for the doctors of LRH at the Khyber Bazaar and 48-room hostel for the doctors of the Khyber Teaching Hospital on University Road for which it was paying Rs13million per month.

This practice, he said, was continued for the past 20 years and the government had paid massive amounts to the owners of the hotels. By spending the amount the government could have built its own hostels, he said.

He said that in Punjab their counterparts were given better facilities, such as salaries and accommodation, while the Frontier government was adamant to listen to their genuine problems.

The government, he said, was also using delaying tactics regarding the regularisation of the contractual doctors. Owing to the government’s apathy, he said, about 2,300 doctors had left the province for foreign countries and the rest were weighing options to quit their jobs.

Dr Qadir said that they were waiting for one week for resolution of their problem and if the government failed to issue notification regarding their demands, they would be left with only one option to begin province wide strike.He said that they would not enter into meetings with the ministers or bureaucrats any more and would start complete strike after one week.