PESHAWAR: The Khyber Pakhtunkhwa government has devised a formula to fix stipends for the trainee medical officers and house job doctors at the medical teaching institutions to improve patients and give an end to series of strikes by medics, according to sources.
They said that Khyber Pakhtunkhwa became the first province to put in place a proper mechanism for stipend of TMOs and house officers, who embroiled in monetary rows with government now and then and the subsequent strikes affected patients.
According to the formula, TMOs will receive about Rs80,000 more in addition to their current Rs48,585 while the stipend for house officers, who gets Rs27,000, will see an increase of Rs30,000 per month.
Sources said that the move was made by health department in response to lucrative package, it had announced for the doctors working in health facilities where Medical Teaching Institutions Reforms Act, 2015 was not enforced. “The initiative will benefit more than 2,150 TMOs and 1,000 house officers across the province,” they said.
Last week, finance department gave approval to the health department’s summary seeking massive raise in the package of the doctors.
Officials said that like other provinces, Khyber Pakhtunkhwa didn’t have any formula for the stipend of doctors and they get increase whenever they resorted to strikes that had negative implications for the patients. “The package is performance-based,” they said.
According to formula, house officers in medical teaching institutions will receive 60 per cent salary of the BPS-17 medical officer in accordance with category of district where they work. The government has already categorised districts as A, B and C on the basis of backwardness where health
TMOs, house officers get massive raise in stipend professional allowance ranging from Rs60,000 to Rs140,000 has been announced last month.
Officials said that TMOs in any of the medical teaching institutions would be entitled to 70 per cent of gross salary of medical officer in first year, 75 per cent in second year, 80 per cent in third, 90 per cent in fourth and 100 per cent in the last year during their five-year training.
“However, stipend for fourth and fifth year will not be allowed till passing the Intermediate Module (IMM) examination,” they said.
Besides, the government has also agreed to additional allowance of Rs30,000 for doctors doing specialisation in anesthesia, radiology, intensive care and emergency medicines etc to strengthen these rare disciplines. The Board of Governors at the MTI-covered hospitals had suggested the increase to cope with shortage of specialists in the unattractive disciplines, officials said.
They said that TMOs involved in other scarce specialises would be identified by BoGs to become beneficiaries of the allowance. The TMOs will also be entitled to Rs15,000 accommodation allowances per month.
In the past, lack of space at hostels triggered protests but now the medical teaching institutions will not be required to house TMOs, who according to the new mechanism may not undertake unsupervised patient care.
The TMOs would spend 56 hours per week in supervised patient care. Overtime work by TMOs would be considered and payment will be made for working more than specified hours for which medical teaching institutions will make precise calculations to ensure overtime assignment with justification.
“None of the TMOs will be assigned more than 10 hours per week overtime. The overtime will not be permitted in consecutive weeks for which rates will be finalised by the medical teaching institutions and government,” said officials.
Published in Dawn, April 6th, 2016
