LAHORE, July 29: Despite approval of the four-tier service structure for doctors in 1994, the Punjab health department has yet to finalize promotion cases of thousands of eligible general cadre doctors in next grades.

The health department has also failed to get 4,000 sanctioned posts of MOs, SMOs, APMOs and PMOs reflected in the budget book. Besides, it lacks exact record of vacant seats of all such medical officers in the province.

These observations were recorded by over 500 doctors in a memorandum presented to Punjab Chief Minister Chaudhry Pervez Elahi by Dr Haq Nawaz Bharwana.

Dr Bharwana said the health and finance departments had also taken no action to get sanctioned BPS-17 posts reflected in the budget book to make a basis for getting new posts from BPS-18 to BPS-20 sanctioned.

The doctors also demanded the chief minister that he should break the 15-year-long deadlock by offering promotion to all the eligible doctors in the province. “The CM should go for a summary promotion of all the eligible doctors as was done for the Fatima Jinnah Medical College cadre teachers,” they added.

They also demanded that the senior medical officers, who had completed their 12 years’ service and secured postgraduate degrees in administrative affairs, should be granted promotions in BPS-19.

They suggested that the government should involve a third party to resolve the promotion cases of the general doctors.