ISLAMABAD, March 2: The postgraduate trainee doctors of Pakistan Institute of Medical Sciences (Pims) on Wednesday staged a brief protest to press the government for honouring a year-old assurance of raising their stipend to Rs10,000 from Rs6,210.

"We will continue these protests if Prime Minister Shaukat Aziz during his visit to the hospital on Friday failed to announce immediate release of the stipend for March with 12-month arrears," a doctor told this reporter.

The unscheduled protest of the trainee doctors raised alarm bells among the hospital management. The matter was immediately reported to the health minister, Mohammad Nasir Khan, who reached the hospital and assured the doctors that he would break them a "good news" within next 24 hours.

Though the doctors called off their strike on the assurance of the minister, they were skeptical of his assurance as, according to them, he had also held out a similar assurance last year. "This is purely a political gimmick," commented a doctor.

Non-payment of the enhanced stipend of Rs10,000, which the health minister had announced in June 2004, is creating unrest among the doctors, especially when their colleagues working in different hospitals of Rawalpindi are getting a stipend of Rs10,000 since July 2004.

A doctor said around 500 trainee doctors working in Pims, FGSH and the Capital Hospital were a victim of the indifferent attitude of the hospitals' managements. He said the orders of the health minister were also being implemented in Punjab and Sindh but not in the capital.

"How can we concentrate on our studies and training when we are out at elbow and our future hangs in the balance," said another doctor. Whenever we approached the administration about this state of affairs, the latter passed the buck onto the finance ministry," he said.

The protesting doctors said the Wednesday's protest was peaceful in which no patient suffered, as it was against their professional ethics to prefer their interests to those of the patients.

They warned that if they were pushed to the wall, they would have no option but to resort to the extreme step. They asked the hospitals administrations to avoid soft-pedalling the issue and raise the stipend to enable them to concentrate on their studies and professional responsibilities.