THE issue of back payment for doctors appears, like taxes, to have been with us forever.
It is a major disgrace that these payments have not been made despite seemingly endless meetings between the doctors’ representatives and the Government.
In acknowledging that our national doctors are owed more than K10 million, we have also maintained that any strike by doctors over salary or entitlements cannot, under any circumstances, be justified.
Doctors and nurses have our lives in their hands.
We are fortunate to have some brilliant specialists among our physicians and surgeons.
We benefit as a people from the care and attention of hundreds of unnamed matrons, sisters and nurses throughout our hospitals.
Both those doctors and the members of the nursing profession work unsocial hours, are often required to conduct multiple operations in a day and are frequently targeted by ignorant relatives when a patient does not make an instant recovery or dies.
They are not particularly well paid and many senior medical staff are accommodated in quarters that would be instantly rejected by their counterparts in all but the poorest of developing countries.
PNG, as we are often told, is not to be numbered among those desperate nations.
That means that the government of the day accepts the responsibility to ensure that these highly skilled professionals are appropriately housed.
That undertaking should also acknowledge that our doctors and nursing staff are paid salaries commensurate with their levels of expertise and dedication.
The practical outcomes of that responsibility have again and again been tardy to make their appearance.
It’s sometimes hard to avoid the impression that the medical fraternity’s commitment to preserving life at all costs has been used against them.
It seems that their dedication to duty has meant that some in politics and the public service have discounted their rightful claims, believing that they will be among the last to protest.
It is not so many months ago that a parallel series of meetings to those just completed between Minister Sasa Zibe and the national doctors resulted in a memorandum of understanding and definite undertakings to pay these outstanding amounts.
Nothing happened.
The doctors might have been forgiven if they saw that MoU and its provisions as just another set of empty promises.
We have recently remarked that Health Minister Zibe is energetic and his approach to this matter reflects the same kind of energy he has begun to display towards the problems of Angau Memorial Hospital.
But we have known many an energetic minister to make undertakings meant to be genuine and binding, only to find that there is many a slip between those agreements and their implementation.
The repeated assurances over a 10-year period of the purchase and installation of an appropriate radiotherapy machine for the country’s only major cancer unit at Angau is a case in point.
There too, Mr Zibe appears to have made strides where others have failed, but that remains to be seen.
The sad part of the current situation is that once again the doctors had to threaten to go on strike before the government hastily took action.
And it is hard to credit the justification for the delay in payment given by the minister who said that “it’s just that people were working in isolation” when referring to a supposed lack of co-ordination between the National Doctor’s Association and the Health Department.
Perhaps – although it’s hard to believe that there would be any lack of effort on the part of the doctors to have the highest possible level of contact with the department, considering the size and scope of the issue concerned and the delay in the implementation of the payment.
We note that the Health Department only began sorting out the payments a week ago yesterday, despite the K10.5 million having been allocated in the 2007 Supplementary Budget following lengthy and at times heated meetings between the two sides.
It is satisfying that this particular issue has been sorted out as we are about to enter 2008; the fewer cases of industrial disharmony PNG experiences at present, the quicker our economy may grow along the lines that the Government has foreshadowed.