KUALA LUMPUR, Sept 2 — Hartal Doktor Kontrak (HDK) does not have plans to organise a doctors’ strike for the time being, after the government promised to raise on-call allowance rates in the upcoming Budget 2025.
Health Minister Dzulkefly Ahmad told reporters last Friday that Prime Minister Anwar Ibrahim, who is also the finance minister, has given a “positive response” to the proposal and that the Ministry of Health (MOH) was “currently awaiting the amount”.
Dzulkefly did not specify the new rate proposed by the MOH, nor how much an on-call allowance raise would cost the government. Medical officers are only paid RM220 for weekend on-call duty, amounting to just RM9.16 per hour for 24 hours’ work.
“Since the health minister already said to wait for Budget 2025 for on-call allowance adjustment news and PMX had also announced a salary adjustment, we feel that having a strike now is unwise and will not get much support from health care workers or the public, unlike the strike organised by HDK on July 26, 2021,” HDK told CodeBlue today.
The informal group representing contract doctors also said the Malaysian Medical Association’s (MMA) proposed on-call allowance rate of RM25 per hour – which would equate to RM600 for an on-call shift, three times the current RM200 amount for weekdays – seemed “fair”.
The government recently gave most civil servants, including doctors, across the board a 15 per cent salary increment.
A medical officer from a public hospital in the Klang Valley, however, called for a 40 per cent salary increase for government doctors across all levels, characterising the general 15 per cent raise as a failure to recognise working conditions unique to doctors who regularly work beyond business hours.
In another letter to CodeBlue, the same medical officer also urged HDK and MMA to organise strike action to push the government to allocate an on-call allowance raise and additional salary increments for doctors in Budget 2025 that is scheduled to be tabled in Parliament in October.
