Overseas junior doctors in contracts row with HSE

JUNIOR DOCTORS recruited from abroad to help fill hospital vacancies are rowing with the Health Service Executive over wages.

The doctors, from India and Pakistan, have written to the HSE to complain that the pay they were offered on recruitment is less than half now being offered in their contracts. They have told the HSE they are reluctant to sign the contracts and begin work because of the discrepancy.

Some 191 junior doctor posts that fell vacant last July were proving difficult to fill and the HSE recruited overseas to help fill the positions. The process has been slow, delayed by requirements to change legislation governing registration of non-EU doctors.

The Medical Council has said that of the 270 non-EU doctors who sat its examinations, almost 90 per cent had passed, but to date only 15 had met all the criteria and had been registered. All 270 doctors are living in Ireland awaiting registration and appointment.

In a letter to HSE general manager of human resources Andrew Condon, 12 of the doctors said the offers they had received from the HSE while still in their home countries were different from the salaries specified in their contracts.

The offers said the estimated average gross pay per year for registrars was €116,000 and €95,000 for senior house officers. But when they were given their contracts in Ireland, they showed salaries of €50,000 for registrars and €38,000 for senior house officers.

“The contracts offered and signed by us back home and the contracts being given to us here in our hospitals differ in description of salary, in that gross average pay is written in [the] previous contract and basic salary in [the] new contract,” the letter said.

“We need to be assured why a different picture was shown to us before coming here and the real picture being portrayed now.”

The doctors said they were aware the basic salary did not include on-call rota fees, but even with these and overtime “you cannot convert €38,000 to €95,000 or €50,000 to €116,000 at any scale of salary”.

They said they were being offered posts at the lowest grade regardless of experience and though they were told they would be given incremental credits once their experience had been verified, this has not happened.

“We have sent you the CVs way back in January 2011 and being interviewed and processed in May/ June 2011 . . . you should have done this verification before appointing us here, so that everyone should have been appointed at the appropriate level,” they said.

In a statement last night, a spokeswoman for the HSE said the offers the doctors received initially gave an example of what a doctor on the midpoint of the scale would earn on a typical on-call rota. The midpoint for a senior house officer was €46,334 a year and €56,260 for registrars.

“A non-consultant hospital doctor working a one-in-five on-call rota will work an average of 26 overtime hours per week, including an average of 10 Sundays and two public holidays per year,” the spokeswoman said.

With average overtime, paid at 1½ times basic pay and double time on Sundays and public holidays, the equivalent of 80½ hours per week would be paid on average.

This was equivalent to an annual salary of €95,650 for senior house officers and €116,119 for registrars, the spokeswoman added.