Collective agreement draws doctors to periphery

Higher state funding also encouraged young physicians to study specialties with inadequate manpower.

By JUDY SIEGEL-ITZKOVICH
LEONID EIDELMAN 370 (photo credit: Avi Ohayon/GPO)
LEONID EIDELMAN 370
(photo credit: Avi Ohayon/GPO)
The collective agreement signed with the Israel Medical Association in August 2011 that offered bonuses to physicians willing to work in the periphery has resulted in 708 doctors going to places outside the Center and encouraged young doctors to study specialties with inadequate manpower, earning a total of NIS 162 million in extra pay, the IMA said on Sunday.
The government is ready to allocate NIS 75m. for this every year, it added.
The deal created “a dramatic change in medicine in the periphery” and brought more doctors to fields that few wanted to study, IMA chairman Leonid Eidelman said.
The IMA and the employers (the government, Clalit Health Services and others) reached an understanding in the past few days that starting this year 2013, every hospital will receive a cost framework for grants according to a formula, each according to its own needs. Hospital managements must prepare the bonus program and hold a discussion of it with the doctors’ committee.
The hospital will report which specialties are short of physicians.
The 2011 agreement, which brought to an end a long strike, included the stipulation that doctors who move to the periphery or are willing to study a specialty with an inadequate number of doctors would get NIS 300,000; if they both move to work in the periphery and study a field with too few doctors, they would get NIS 500,000.
Eidelman gave examples of the change resulting from the bonuses: At Western Galilee Hospital in Nahariya, three new departments are opening because doctors are available to run them.
And at Soroka University Medical Center in Beersheba, which has hardly received new residents for years, there is a new pediatric intensive care department with a waiting list of doctors who want to be hired.