KARACHI, March 3: Junior doctors undergoing a one-year diploma training programme at the Jinnah Postgraduate Medical Centre have been asked to pay Rs2,000 per month since the date of their admission for various diploma courses.

The young doctors, mainly comprising fresh medical graduates who already have inadequate sources of income, expressing their serious reservations about the JPMC decision and that no amount was ever charged for various courses from previous batches.

Talking to APP here on Friday, they said the JPMC notification was absolutely paradoxical in a situation that the post-graduates for FCPS at JPMC are paid Rs8,000 per month as stipend, while the 200 post-graduates for diploma programme at the same institute are paid nothing.

“We perform eight to 2 O’clock duty all the seven days of the week, including a 24-hour duty once a week on rotation basis and also remain on call in normal days, as well as in emergency conditions, but are not even paid a single penny,” a doctor complained.

The aggrieved trainees said that they have failed to understand the logic for seeking Rs2,000 as a fee from them while paying them between Rs6,000 to Rs8000 per month for FCPS.

This, however, is not the case with the CPSP, they said, which charges Rs9,000 as admission fee and between 30,000 and 80,000 as registration fee.

According to them, contrary to CPSP the diploma students doing diploma training programmes at gynaecological and obstetrics, radiotherapy, thoracic medicine, neurology and ENT departments of JPMC are required to pay a nominal amount for being registered with Karachi University.

Maintaining that since successful completion of the diploma course enables young doctors to get themselves enrolled with MD, a significant number of doctors prefer to undertake these training programmes, offered in different provincial and federal government teaching hospitals across the country, for which they are not charged any fee, but are paid a stipend of Rs6,000.

JPMC director, Prof Mashoor Alam Shah, acknowledged that the diploma trainees at the JPMC have been asked to pay Rs2,000 per month as no government grant was available for these programmes.

He said all this money would be accounted for, adding that the JPMC was attempting to run these training programmes on “self-help basis”, as each and every education-cum-training programme has its expenditure.

As for FCPS, he said stipend for the trainees is provided by the federal government, and of the 450 house officers doing house-job at the JPMC, (230 identified as house physicians) are paid by the Sindh Medical College and the remaining by the federal government.—APP