THE CABINET on April 24 approved legislative guarantees regarding salary increases for hospital doctors based on an agreement between Health Minister Zuzana Zvolenská and the Medical Trade Unions (LOZ), the TASR newswire reported.
Doctors’ salaries should have gone up at the beginning of 2013, according to the terms of a memorandum signed by the LOZ and the cabinet of Iveta Radičová at the end of 2011, following mass industrial action by hospital doctors.
The government has only now approved the hike, however, and scheduled it to take place in two stages. The first increase should come as of January 2014, with the salaries of trainee doctors set to reach 1.25-times Slovakia’s average salary, and those of fully-qualified doctors to 2.1-times the average salary. As of the following year, fully-qualified doctors should receive 2.3-times the average salary, TASR wrote.
These two increases will translate into additional state budget expenditures of €30 million a year.
Doctors’ employers will, however, have to obtain the money to increase the salaries from “their own resources”, Health Ministry State Secretary Viliam Čislák said.
“The government has none, gives none,” Čislák said as quoted by the SITA newswire, adding that there are “no special resources for this occasion”. The resources that hospitals receive for health care from the ministry cannot be used for salary increases, he noted.
