There is a lot of hype at the moment around the medical health industry. Apparently Doctors are threatening to strike at the end of this month if they don’t receive a 50 – 70% pay increase. Now we all have this idea that doctors are paid a lot of money but that doesn’t seem to be the case, a general surgeon at a hospital in Durban says he earns R19000.00 after deductions including pay for overtime, so that means that he earns R365.00 per hour, I don’t know if that’s fair or not but what I do know is doctors take an oath to save lives and it seems like they have forgotten that little fact. I read an interview with the minister of health Dr. Aaron Motsoaledi and he has a whole bunch of interesting things to say about this dispute.Minister Motsoaledi’s response to the various questions posed to him went something along the lines of: although he sympathises with the doctors and he thinks their demands may be fair it’s just not realistic in this current economic climate, He himself was once a public sector doctor and he knows that the hours are hard but at the end of the day the reason that so much is demanded of doctors is because of a shortage in the field making it difficult to relieve doctors, the minister even had a solution to the problem, he says that he will be re-opening government nursing colleges in an effort to relieve work load in the hospital environment. I don’t know what you guys think but this sounds like a man who is willing to work on the issues in his department and I agree with him fully when he says that strike action should never reach the point that we no longer care about people’s lives.
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