On the World Day for Decent Work marked on October 7, the Syndicate of Health Care Syndicates Federation within the Confederation of Independent Trade Unions in Bulgaria, together with the Bulgarian Association of Health Professionals, launched a national protest in front of the Council of Ministers building in Sofia. The protesters demanded decent salaries for the specialists employed in the health sector and better labor conditions. They also demand that the minimum monthly salary of the Bulgarian nurses and other health specialists become EUR 450 and the minimum monthly starting wage of the young doctors reaches EUR 550. According to the protesters, these basic requirements are already part of the branch collective labor agreement for 2018, but the minimum salary levels have not been reached in many Bulgarian hospitals and institutions employing health specialists.

The minimum wages agreed in the collective agreement have not been reached in most places, Todorka Damyanova from the town of Dupnitsa (Southwest Bulgaria) told Radio Bulgaria. We want one thing – to receive the wages negotiated in the collective labor agreement in our sector. Health is important to all of us.

We are not protesting for decent salaries only. We also want to ensure competent and qualified medical care for our children, Krasimira Bakardzhieva who works as a nurse at the German Language High School in Sofia says. When you work in a school and you take care of the health of many children, you often have to react immediately in a given situation. Our salaries have always been the lowest. The branch collective agreement guarantees decent wages, but the money is distributed in accordance with the number of children in each school. In some towns and villages the number of children is low; in other their number is higher. That is why we insist that the system of financing must change. Some people may think that we do not carry out any medical activities since we are employed at high schools. On the contrary, we are dealing with health promotion and disease prevention on a daily basis, which is extremely important.

In parallel with the protest of CITUB and the Bulgarian Association of Health Professionals, health specialists are protesting in front of the building of the Bulgarian Ministry of Health. They launched a petition for comprehensive healthcare reform. The organizers of the petition have been protesting since March this year.  They differentiated themselves from the protests of the Confederation of Independent Trade Unions and the Bulgarian Association of Health Professionals, because in their words, the problems in Bulgaria’s healthcare system are much deeper:

The Bulgarian Association of Health Professionals has been functioning for 20 years and we have not felt any change at all – neither in our status, nor in our remuneration and labor conditions, nurse Krasimira Mehandzhiyska pointed out. The Bulgarian nurses are leaving Bulgaria; the patients are paying a lot of money for expensive medical treatment, although they pay their health insurance contributions. We want to stop that. We want new health system based on systematic medical treatment and prevention where people receive adequate treatment.

Health professionals from 49 Bulgarian towns joined the protests in the recent months. However, nothing has changed in this country’s health system. The government promised to allocate EUR 25 million for salaries and nearly EUR 15 million went to the system in two tranches. However, due to the absence of mechanisms that would direct this money for pay increase, the managers of the hospitals use this money for other purposes. Nurse Maya Ilieva who has been among the leaders of the protests of the Bulgarian health professionals told Radio Bulgaria that the healthcare system can function well only if clear rules are adopted.

We must know where the public finance goes, how this money is spent and distributed, what it is used for. Above all, we want control. So far, none of our demands have been met. We, the medical specialists who have been protesting since March, differentiate from today’s protest organized by CITUB and the Bulgarian Association of Health Professionals. This protest was controlled in advance, because they demand that the minimum wages agreed in the collective labor agreement in our sector are reached. This should happen back on January 1 and if the current protest was held on January 2 we would have surely supported it. We want reforms in the sector. The current system is not functioning. The authorities allocate money for clinical pathways and our salaries depend on the number of patients who go under medical treatment in our hospitals. This is ridiculous. It turns out that we must wait for someone to get ill, in order to receive our wages. Moreover, we do not know how the money from the health insurance contributions is distributed. In other words, the current health system in Bulgaria is dangerous, Maya Ilieva says.

Bulgarian student Dimitar Panayotov also supported the petition of the medics:

I am here to support the cause of the health specialists, because this is the fight of the whole nation for reforms in the system of healthcare. There will be no healthcare in Bulgaria, if the system does not change in the next five years.

English version: Kostadin Atanasov