Monday, January 24, 2011

The Diplomacy of Maldivian MOH towards the Doctors and Nurses working under (not ‘for’ but ‘under’) them.


The Diplomacy of Maldivian MOH towards the Doctors and Nurses working under (not ‘for’ but ‘under’) them.
The MOH  Maldives has found another (one more in the chain of findings which surface almost every year in disguise of ‘for the betterment of services and to increase the efficiency of health services in Maldives’) idea to better themselves. Although only God knows how can anything, so perfect in making and executing, be bettered…
The MOH has very cleverly divided the entire Maldives in 9 zones and are making one health corporation in each zone to locally manage the health services. As they say it ‘this corporation will be a private body’ but in fact the corporations are 100% government owned bodies totally in control of the government (who said these Maldivians are stupids???) and hence will be only the private face of a government body.
This corporation has been already doing what it has to. They returned back the 15% cut from the salary and all the allowances which the government was illegally deducting from everyone’s salaries (mostly from the expatriates as no other person actually works here). But there was something called a ‘RISK ALLOWANCE’, which was actually 20% of the total effective salary, has been deducted now. Because they think that living in a possible Tsunami coming area, working in the health sector without gloves and masks to protect you against common infections gifted by patients (don’t ask about any protection gear against Hepatitis ‘B’ or HIV, not even vaccine. Of course none of these is available here and for these reasons only this ‘Risk Allowance’ was actually meant to be providing a little money lure) is not risky at all. The fact that we don’t even have normal antibiotics to write as they are not available in islands. Maale’ is another thing. There may be a lot of things there but on islands where they put expatriates to work (Maale’ is for Maldivian doctors mostly or even if expatriates are working there then these Maldivian consultants humiliate them every single day), there are very limited choice of medicines available.
So, by giving back 15% and taking away 20% your salary has actually come down by almost 5%. Plus now this corporation has decided to deduct 7% of the basic salary (which in itself is almost 50% of the total effective salary) for the pension fund (as if expatriates will have this much courage to stand these bastards for a long enough period to get that pension) which again means that your effective salary will come down by another 3.5%.  
So, by doing this corporation thing (after all the corporation has 8 members of board who get a salary of almost MRF 20,000 = $1550 each and hat money has to come from somewhere) the effective salary of a Medical Officer which is at the moment MRF 16,100 = $1250 will become  8.5% less and a MO will get $1150 = INR 50,500.  Plus MO has to hire a room to live. Living allowance is the same as before (MRF 1500) and you need to pay MRF 1000 from your salary to hire a room. So, effectively you get $1000 = INR 44,000 in salary from where you have to feed yourself. How much a MO can save from here?
Specialist’s salary they are taking down by 20% in the new contract. They are going to put less working hour per week to justify their decrease in salary. Plus the total hours of possible overtime will be limited to 40 hours per month only. But nevertheless you are supposed to attend all calls and can’t deny from it. Means the volume of work will be same but they will pay you much less than before. At this time a specialists salary in Maldives is much higher than anywhere in the developing world. Plus the overtime is free, which means as many hours they do overtime, is all payable on a pro rata basis. But now will be a different situation from March onwards.
You can well conclude that these people know diplomacy very well. This all is happening when there is a contract (which is supposed to be valid in the court of law but which actually is a piece of garbage only as they breech this contract almost all the time without thinking much about it.) and a normal person can think that this contract is abiding both ways.
But no….this is not the case.

3 comments:

  1. What is the current salary structure in maldives for MBBS doctors.

    ReplyDelete
  2. I want to see the agreement contract, can anybody send me at my email?

    ReplyDelete