The supposedly final meeting headed by Senator Ishaq Dar to resolve the issue of service structure for doctors has been delayed yet again after differences in the record presented by the government and the doctors, Pakistan Today has learnt.
The government has been in contact with various organizations of doctors and has held several meetings in this regard over a period of time and Saturday’s meeting was said to be the final meeting headed by the Pakistan Muslim League-Nawaz senator.
The committee earlier proposed that after dilating the old formula, all doctors serving in grade 17 and 18 will be promoted to grade 18 and 19 respectively, while the considerable number of APMOs (BS 19) will be promoted to grade 20.
Dr Masood Sheikh, who was representing the point of view of General Cadre Doctors Association, stated that they agreed with this proposal in principle, provided all the doctors as mentioned above were promoted to a new grade. He pointed out that the current seniority list only represented around 800 doctors; while hundreds of doctors who were promoted to grade 18 in 2011 have not been included in the seniority list as yet. These doctors had already served the Punjab government for a minimum length of 16 to 20 years, and per the formula decided by the committee, they were eligible for promotion to grade 20 even, he added.
“We are not pressing for promotions to grade 20 but their promotion to grade 19 should be ensured so that there will be no resentment among grade 18 senior general cadre doctors,” Sheikh said, adding that the general cadre doctors had been the back bone of health delivery system with a total number of around1,400 which was more than twice the number of all the cadres present in Health Department.
Talking about the solution of the issue he pointed out to the chairman that all doctors working in grade 18 at the moment should be given a chance of promotion to grade 19 on regular basis, either as a one time dispensation as has been recently given to teaching and specialist cadre, or by dilating the formula more than 19 percent may be 23-24 percent for grade 19 as has been demanded by the GCDA. He also pointed out that many new seats were being created yet they were not reflecting the cadre strength for the past few years thus effectively blocking the route of promotion. It should be ensured, he said, that the newly created seats be made a function of the cadre strength and similarly seats in different grades be recalculated as per the new strength on a 6 monthly basis.
These measures would break the deadlock, adding that otherwise the doctors serving in the department for an average length of 17 to 20 years would be deprived of promotion to grade 19 despite all the exercise. Later on an emergency meeting of the GCDA was held today to discuss the progress of service structure in the meeting with Senator Ishaq Dar.
Deadlock must be broken as early as possible in the large interest of the serving doctors as well as the ailing community. Regretfully, this matter has not been resolved since long (more than a year) as it should not have taken more than a month. Bureaucratic slow motion movement. as is prevalent in our administration set up.
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