Health staffing row over vacant clinic rooms and idle doctors

TDT | Manama

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Vacant clinic rooms and trained doctors without posts dominated a parliamentary exchange yesterday, as MP Jaleela Alawi pressed the Health Ministry on staffing gaps, promotion routes and how it works out consultant numbers.

Alawi said the ministry’s reply to her parliamentary question on consultant and non-consultant doctors in public hospitals and health centres left out key detail needed to judge staffing needs.

“Of course every point in the question was deliberate and had a purpose and meaning,” she told the Council of Representatives. “We want answers because we want to know the real situation, as the ministry did not address many of the details.”

Promotions

She said the reply did not show the latest promotions doctors had received or the career ceiling for each post, and that it relied on general remarks about increasing consultant numbers without explaining how current doctors would be moved to consultant grade, or what the ministry’s staffing need was.

“A parliamentary question is a tool through which we extract the remedy and lay the groundwork for effective treatment, and the Ministry of Health’s reply was not, unfortunately, satisfactory,” she said.

Alawi pointed to dentistry and family medicine as examples.

Figures

She said the ministry’s figures showed a mismatch between the number of dentists and the number of dental rooms, and asked if there was a plan to staff each room with two to three dentists.

The lawmaker also referred to dentists trained through Tamkeen placements who had worked in health centres for four years and, she said, helped cut appointment waits from six months to two weeks.

She also questioned a split in training routes.

Benefits

Some trainees, she said, were ministry employees with full employment benefits, including pension cover, while others were on the Tamkeen scheme with different grades and pay.