The Senior House Officers’ strike begins this weekend.
Senior House Officers-SHOs deployed for post-graduate or specialist training at various hospitals across the country declared on Saturday that they would start a nationwide strike on Sunday night over salary arrears.
The specialist doctors told a press conference in Mulago on Saturday that while they are entitled to a monthly allowance of 2.5 Million Shillings, they haven’t received the money since October and their call for payment to the Ministry of Health has gone unanswered.
According to Dr. Robert Lubega, the Chief Resident at Makerere University College of Health Sciences, the government is in a habit of not remitting allowances to first-year students for the first three to six months of reporting to work-study training.
“Most recently the current second-year lot of SHOs based at Mbarara Regional Referral Hospital missed their payment for the first 6 months without any explanation as to why the allowance didn’t come when they were in the First Year”, he said.
Currently, the doctor says first-year officers based in Mulago, Kiruddu, and Kawempe National Referral Hospitals in addition to Mbale Regional Referral hospital have not yet received their allowances since they reported to the work-study sites in October last year. Those in Kabale hospital haven’t received theirs since August 2022.
According to a statement signed by four representatives of SHOs based at the different universities, prior negotiations with Dr. Diana Atwine, the Permanent Secretary in the Ministry of Health last year only resulted in some of them being paid and others being left out without an explanation.
It should be noted strikes by medical workers have become common whereby whenever their salaries delay, they lay down tools affecting the operations of hospitals across the country since they majorly rely on doctors in training to run health facilities considering the very low doctor-to-patient ratios in the country.
Dr. Hebert Luswata, the General Secretary of the Uganda Medical Association (UMA) says striking is their weapon of last resort as healthcare managers tend to pay a deaf ear whenever they raise their concerns in a cordial way.
He now says that apart from paying the SHOs arrears, the government needs to employ those who finish training as Senior Medical Officers as this will have them get a fixed wage rather than allowances. He notes that there is already a seventy percent gap to fill in as only 30% of vacancies for specialists in regional referral hospitals are filled.
“They need to provide housing near hospitals where they work. SHOs work 24 hours a week and are the first line of Specialists. This is why the first Doctor to die in the recent Ebola outbreak was Dr. Mohammed Ali who was an SHO of KIU working in Mubende Regional hospital”.
Meanwhile, the resolution to pay senior house officers a monthly allowance was birthed in 2016 when President Yoweri Museveni while attending the UMA General Assembly said that not paying these graduate doctors was an act of modern-day slavery.
Payment of SHOs would then start in July 2021, giving them a monthly allowance of 2.5 million Shillings.
Countrywide, there are 692 Senior House Officers deployed in different parts of the country.
While one would say these are small in number and may not affect the daily operations of the hospitals, Luswata says SHOs supervise medical interns and their absence means the junior doctors will work unsupervised creating a risk of mistakes in care.
However, Atwine didn’t pick up her calls to respond to these concerns when contacted by URN.
-URN
