Minimum wages in health care. What about the fixes?

The Sejm is working on the draft law on the minimum wage of health care workers at an express pace: on Wednesday, both the first and second reading of the draft took place, during which PiS praised the government for bringing about the creation of regulations in the spirit of dialogue, compromise and consensus, which may not be fully satisfactory for anyone, but in a real way - as the MPs of the United Right emphasized - improve the situation of health care workers, while the opposition pointed out that this dialogue on the part of the government consists in rejecting all, even the most justified, comments and amendments . The only change the government agreed to with regard to the form of the annex to the act (i.e. the table with the classification of individual professions and indicators by which the base amount is multiplied) was the transfer of electroradiology technicians from the seventh to the sixth group.

Twelve amendments were tabled during the second reading - including amendments increasing the indexes for specialist physicians and the group of nurses and other medical professionals included in the group with the index 0.94. In the speeches of the interested parties and opposition deputies there was a strong argument that since nurses are a professional group that is dramatically lacking in the Polish health care system, and in the following years - due to the demographic profile - the deficits will only deepen, no nurse should earn less than the government offered to non-healthcare workers (indicator 1). Another amendment concerned the transfer to a higher group, following electroradiology techniques, of pharmaceutical technicians. However, the Parliamentary Health Committee rejected all substantive amendments and the draft will be returned to the Sejm for a vote, practically in the form in which it was presented during the second reading - only the editorial and technical corrections were approved by the majority.