Two hundred medical residents are expected to tender their resignation to the Ministry of Health on Thursday at 2 p.m. due to an ongoing dispute over excessive shift work.
Currently, medical residents have to do 26 hour shiftsbut have advocated reducing them to 16-18 hours, arguing that their inability to focus for such a long period without sleep poses a threat to both their patients and their colleagues in the medical community.
The Mirsham union, which speaks on behalf of medical students, gave the Ministry of Health a 2 pm deadline to comply with the union’s demands.
Ynet reported that in addition to the 200 residents due to resign on Thursday, 300 interns have also signed resignation letters and are threatening to hand them in if the Ministry of Health does not reduce the length of their shifts.
The resignations will not take effect until two weeks following the employer receives the letter, giving the Health Ministry another two weeks to try to prevent a mass departure of medical students.
On Wednesday, the Minister of Health, Nitzan Horowitz, sided with the protesting locals and blamed the Ministry of Finance, stating that “the Ministry of Health supports the reduction of shifts” and that “the budget exists” to apply the change.
Horowitz said that the Treasury Department “disregarded its obligations … and frustrated the application of the process.”
He said sarcastically: “I would like to see the staff of the Ministry of Finance work for 26 hours straight.”
The administration had promised to implement the shorter shifts by April this year, but in July they announced that the new schedule would not come into effect until September 2023, angering residents.
In October, many left the city because they didn’t like working 26-hour shifts. The administration then presented a plan to reduce the length of shifts to 16-18 hours in 10 hospitals in rural areas far from the country’s urban core. On April 1 it was scheduled to start.
However, following the government declared that any change in shifts would be postponed until next year, Mirsham issued a statement saying that Chancellor of the Exchequer Oran Barbivai had “bowed in” to pressure and that the delay was a “death sentence” for the decrease in shifts.
Before the year 2000, residents typically worked 36 hours per week (or more). That year an agreement was reached to reduce the work to 26 hours with a 2-hour break.
In 2012, following numerous requests for shorter shifts were denied, the government capped weekly hours at 71.5 and mandated working only two shifts a week.
Despite the new regulations, many medical centers have not yet complied with them.