JUDASA slams Eastern Cape on non-payment issue
The Junior Doctors Association of South Africa (JUDASA) has strongly condemned the Eastern Cape's decision not to pay junior doctors until the end of March, calling on the Minister of Health and the National Treasury to intervene.
The Association's chairperson Dr Tende Makofane, while encouraging junior doctors in the province to honour their contracts nonetheless, expressed his disappointment at the Eastern Cape Treasury's decision to instruct the provincial Health Department not to honour the payment of salaries of new employees until the end of the financial year.
"This effectively means that all our junior doctors working in that province will only receive their first salaries at the end of April 2012 - totally unacceptable," he said.
"This is clearly the Treasury's desperate effort to conceal the province's financial woes and gross financial mismanagement by using newly employed doctors as part of its cost-cutting measures," Makofane added.
JUDASA maintains that it will not back down until government intervenes:
"We are here to ensure that junior doctors do not become scapegoats in ill-conceived cost-cutting manoeuvers aimed at concealing the Eastern Cape government's financial crisis."
The association believes this ill-treatment of doctors clearly indicates the Eastern Cape provincial government's disregard for doctors' livelihoods which, in turn, has resulted in junior doctors' reluctance to honour their bursary commitments.
"We have always encouraged doctors to honour their contracts, but in this instance we are not surprised by this blatant hypocrisy as it is the self-same province criticising doctors for leaving the province!"
Makofane also raised concerns regarding the working conditions under which junior doctors have to function in the Eastern Cape, particularly with the obvious neglect of the local hospitals: "Community service doctors who are thrown into the outlying hospitals in the Eastern Cape fall victim to these unbearable working conditions, and the trauma of the needless loss of life as a result."
He concluded that JUDASA would try by whatever means to encourage doctors who are bursary holders of government to fulfill their contractual obligations, with the proviso that thel Minister of Health and the National Treasury intervenes in the Eastern Cape's unacceptable abuse of doctors.
Statement issued by Sinenhlanhla Gumede, PR and Media Liaison officer, JUDASA/SAMA, January 23 2012
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