PETER Visolajský, the newly-elected leader of the Medical Trade Unions Association (LOZ) which rallied protesting doctors in 2011, is not ruling out doctors engaging in a strike in the future if the government attempts to change the law on minimum salaries of doctors at state-run hospitals that was enacted in December 2011 to resolve a crisis after doctors resigned en masse from their positions.
As reported by the Sme daily, Visolajský said LOZ was concerned about maintaining the salary increases won by doctors because they are now being linked to the salaries of nurses and other medical staff and he believes this could threaten doctors’ salary levels.
“Only recently the doctors won the law on minimum salary in a tough fight that traumatised all of society,” Visolajský stated, as quoted by the TASR newswire, referring to the protests that culminated last December when thousands of Slovak doctors made good on their threats to resign.
The statement came from LOZ’s chairman as a reaction to a meeting between Health Minister Zuzana Zvolenská and representatives of other health-care professions at which she agreed to prepare a law that would define minimum salaries for all employees working in the health-care sector, the SITA newswire reported.
SITA wrote that there are large differences in health-care salaries between regions as well as professions, noting that an emergency rescue worker and a radiology technician earn much less than a nurse even though their duties require the same level of education.
