Temporarily employed doctors stage rally

The Jakarta Post, Jakarta

Some 200 "temporarily employed" doctors from across the country held a rally at the Ministry of Health office here on Monday to demand the government clarify their status along with improvements to their welfare.

The physicians, grouped in the Indonesian Doctors Forum (FDI), warned that if their demands are not met thousands of these temporarily employed doctors would hold a national strike.

Temporarily employed doctors are usually recent graduates of medical schools who are obliged, based on Law No. 8/1961, to serve a mandatory period of service assigned by the government.

These doctors are assigned for two- to- three-year periods, often in remote locations around the archipelago.

The mandatory service period is regarded as a prerequisite before they can open private practices as general practitioners or study further in a specialist field.

It is estimated that there are some 10,000 temporarily employed doctors serving the 27,000 community health centers throughout Indonesia.

FDI's spokesman Agung Sapta Adi said on Monday that these doctors were merely being exploited by the government. He added that despite the years of service in "hardship" locations, these doctors also had no clear employment status -- neither as contract workers nor civil servants.

Agung added that not only were they being paid subsistence wages, their salary more often than not was not paid on time.

Minister of Health Achmad Sujudi, who met the protesting doctors and claimed he sympathized with their plight, said there was little he could do given temporarily employed doctors were bound by laws and decrees.

Stressing that strikes were not an acceptable course of action, he suggested they directly seek the support of legislators to amend the law.

But several of the doctors said the strike would proceed if their concerns were not addressed.

Dendi Kadarsan, a doctor stationed in Indramayu, West Java, however said the doctors would still uphold the ethics of their profession and only engage in a "structural strike" which would only disrupt routine health care but not critical life and death situations.