More than 600 health professionals are lined up for promotion as the government moves to fulfil the pledges it made last year to have doctors return to work after a three-week strike.
The Public Service Commission last week advertised for 629 senior positions in the Medical Services Ministry to be filled by serving officers, opening a career progression path for hundreds of personnel who had stagnated in their positions for decades.
“It is another step forward that the government has taken since promotion was a key element of our return-to-work formula,” Boniface Chitayi, secretary general of the Kenya Medical Practitioners, Pharmacists and Dentists Union (KMPDU) said on Friday.
Among the staff to be hired are 17 senior deputy directors of medical services, 200 deputy directors of medical services and 270 senior assistant directors of medical services.
The new jobs come with a standard Sh30,000 emergency call allowance for doctors and pharmacists. They also carry an extraneous allowance of between Sh15,000 and Sh20,000 for doctors, pharmacists, nurses and clinical officers.
The demand for emergency call and extraneous allowances featured prominently when doctors went on strike last December to press for better terms of employment.
The twin benefits that doctors have negotiated – taken together with housing, leave, non-practice and commuter allowances on their pay slips — will rise to two times the current basic salary for all the job groups.
For instance, a senior deputy director of medical services whose basic salary ranges between Sh100,620 and Sh127,980 will now earn allowances totalling Sh200,000.
The extraneous pay will apply to all medical staff and will be financed by the additional Sh7.1 billion that the government pledged to release in seven months after doctors rejected an earlier proposal to pay the money in three years.
Part of the m
ney was to be released in December with the final phase to be allocated in the 2012/13 Budget for drawing from July this year.
The medical personnel’s demand that their salaries also be raised by 300 per cent, however, will have to wait for the recently launched Salaries Review Commission to review and harmonise remuneration across professions and departments in the civil service, said Titus Ndambuki, the public service permanent secretary. On Friday, KMPDU officials said the government must implement other facets of the return-to-work formula to restore sanity in the health sector.
Apart from promotion, the union wants the government to immediately honour its pledge to hire 200 additional personnel to public health facilities under the improved terms of employment.
They also want the government to ensure public hospitals have adequate supply of drugs, equipment and medical supplies.
The government had also undertaken to disburse Sh200 million for training and Sh85 million for clearing debts.
Doctors said the progress has been too slow.
“Public hospitals at district levels have run out of essential drugs such as insulin because the Kenya Medical Supplies Agency (Kemsa) has abruptly reduced its normal supply by 10 per cent,” Mr Chitayi said.
However, Kemsa said it had not cut its supply to public health facilities with officials saying they were constrained by budgetary allocation.
“We are up-to-date with our supply of drugs to all the institutions to the extent that the Sh4 billion allocation can go,” said Dominic Kabiru, the agency’s spokesperson.
Last Thursday, the taskforce on medical services asked the government to raise the budgetary allocation to the health sector by Sh60 billion.
The amount was 20 per cent lower than theSh75.2 billion that health ministry officials said was need to support their services under the county system.
