Doctors threaten national strike in 5 days

[Omaha Steve]

Source: Capital News

NAIROBI, Kenya, Dec 28 – Just a day after teachers threatened to go on strike, doctors gave the government five days within which to respond to their demands or also mobilise a nationwide medics’ strike.

The Kenya Medical Practitioners, Pharmacists and Dentists Union (KMPDU) Secretary General Ouma Oluga told a press conference in Nairobi that the industrial action by doctors in Kiambu began on December 18.

“KMPDU herein, therefore gives Kiambu County a five-day ultimatum to end this stalemate they created. In the event that it is not amicably solved, the union shall have no option but to mobilise for nationwide doctors strike,” Oluga warned.

He said the strike will involve doctors in public and private medical centre in support of doctors in Kiambu to ensure the Collective Bargaining Agreement (CBA) and a 600 percent pay rise is implemented.

FULL story at link.

Read more: http://www.capitalfm.co.ke/news/2014/12/doctors-threaten-national-strike-in-5-days/

[CanSocDem]

1. They should be careful.

People live longer WITHOUT doctors. They discover, out of necessity, their own healing abilities.

http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/18849101

A paradoxical pattern has been suggested in the literature on doctors' strikes: when health workers go on strike, mortality stays level or decreases. We performed a review of the literature during the past forty years to assess this paradox. We used PubMed, EconLit and Jstor to locate all peer-reviewed English-language articles presenting data analysis on mortality associated with doctors' strikes. We identified 156 articles, seven of which met our search criteria. The articles analyzed five strikes around the world, all between 1976 and 2003. The strikes lasted between nine days and seventeen weeks. All reported that mortality either stayed the same or decreased during, and in some cases, after the strike. None found that mortality increased during the weeks of the strikes compared to other time periods. The paradoxical finding that physician strikes are associated with reduced mortality may be explained by several factors. Most importantly, elective surgeries are curtailed during strikes. Further, hospitals often re-assign scarce staff and emergency care was available during all of the strikes. Finally, none of the strikes may have lasted long enough to assess the effects of long-term reduced access to a physician. Nonetheless, the literature suggests that reductions in mortality may result from these strikes.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/programmes/more_or_less/7408337.stm


http://curezone.com/forums/am.asp?i=886548


"When doctors strike, fewer people die.
In 1973 doctors in Israel staged a month-long strike and during that month, mortality fell by 50 percent. A couple of years later, a two-month work stoppage by doctors in the Columbian capital of Bogotá led to a 35-percent decline in deaths. And during a “work slowdown” by doctors in Los Angeles protesting against the sharp increase in premiums for liability insurance, the number of deaths fell by 18 percent. Once doctors were back at work full time, mortality immediately jumped back to the previous level. Every year, 1.2 million Britons are hospitalized as a result of improper medical care. In the United States – where 40,000 people are shot to death each year – the chance of getting “killed” by a doctor is three times greater than being killed by a gun. And every year significantly more people die from an infection sustained while in the hospital than as a result of traffic accidents. Over 20 years ago the American culture critic Ivan Illich wrote that health care has become a threat to our health. But this is still not the prevailing image. Modern healthcare is considered one of the triumphs of the twentieth century. Most people are convinced that a close family member or friend without a pill or a doctor’s input wouldn’t be alive today. But as lauded as today’s doctors are, they are no more effective – when it comes to medicine – than the priests of yesteryear."

emphasis added



.