A call for justice for physicians

Health workers have serious problems. There is no doubt about this. The CHP's calling the TBMM to an extraordinary session to discuss the situation of health workers is a sign that there are existing problems that are wide open to political use.

It is needless to dwell at length on whether the CHP's intention is really to discuss the problems of health workers or whether it is trying to carve out a mission for itself through these problems. If there is a problem, then regardless of the intention or approach with which the opposition brings it to the agenda, nothing could be more natural than its bringing it to the agenda.

Of course the CHP's chairman has experience in medical administration. This experience does not in fact evoke very good memories. The typical and instructive scenes belonging to old Turkey have been etched into memories during Kılıçdaroğlu's management of the SSK. Etched into memories is putting it mildly; for Turkey they are nightmarish scenes, like traumas it never wants to remember. The perpetrators of events full of scandal in every frame, in which neither patient nor health worker had any satisfaction, ought to have no face to speak about today's health system.

But the CHP leadership's having no such face does not change the fact that there are serious problems.

In essence, the greatest success that has carried the AK Parti in power for 20 years in an exceptional manner is its success in the field of health. Everyone knows, sees and appreciates this, such that it was able to win six parliamentary elections in a row, in a way not granted to any political party in any democratic country, and to continue its rule alone.

Perhaps in the face of the obvious failures, the scandalous evils, the incompetence and the lack of qualification of previous administrations, the AK Parti always showed and always reminded of its wide margin. But the 20 years that have passed make some forget certain things, some never lived it and know nothing, and some opportunists invest in this forgetfulness and ignorance.

The CHP's calling an extraordinary session to discuss the situation of health workers, with magnificent timing, is an expression of this opportunism. With such a call it is seeking to clean its bad record in the field of health, but this is a futile effort. The CHP's GBT record in the field of health, leaving other fields aside, is not something that can be erased with such a cheap tactic.

Quite apart from these calculations of the CHP, the situation of health workers is truly a serious matter. It concerns urgent measures that the government must take, without even needing to call the Assembly to an extraordinary session.

The AK Parti's twenty years of single-party rule is of course not a rule forcibly imposed on the people. It is not a rule presumed to the people by fait accompli under conditions in which real elections did not exist, as in the Single Party period. Behind the vote of confidence and support that the people gave this government by a wide margin six times in a row, and 16 times counting the local administrations and referendums in between, lies its having remained faithful to its contract with the people.

Loyalty to the people has brought service to the people, and this in turn has brought the continuation of the people's support. One of the most obvious fields in this regard has been the field of health. The AK Parti government, as we said before, has implemented a kind of health revolution that gives priority to citizen-patient satisfaction, and while this revolution secures citizen satisfaction at the highest level, it has also today made Turkey a center of health tourism worldwide.

However, as we also noted before, while this revolution secured the satisfaction of the people, it rested to a large extent on the sacrifices and painstaking work of health workers, especially physicians. Health workers have had to work, within a health system developed to satisfy the people, under very heavy burdens and with a reward that is not at all commensurate with their labor.

In the modern world, medicine has always been at the top of the hierarchy of professions. Its education, from the entrance exam onward, requires a far more difficult and longer process than the others. While graduates of ordinary faculties graduate in 4 years, doctors take 6 years and are subject to additional compulsory service. Moreover, the exceedingly wearing and exhausting hierarchical relationship that the discipline of the profession requires does not exist in many other professions. While long shifts and the risks they take during treatment leave them continually alone with serious security risks in the human relations they enter into with patients or their relatives, they can at the same time be exposed to a discrediting discourse built up about them.

We can say that the salaries of the doctors to whom we have to entrust our lives are today certainly not fair when compared with other professions.

I will not say that members of other professions get a lot, but compared with them doctors' pay remains at a very low level. If you like, let us compare them with judges and prosecutors, teachers, imams or security officers. Let it not be misunderstood, I do not think that the salaries any of these receive are low, but it is quite clear that, compared with them, doctors' salaries should be adjusted more fairly in view of the intensity of their labor, their suffering, their hardships and their technical-scientific capabilities.

Many people claim that doctors have additional income since they receive "revolving fund contributions" anyway. This is one of the frequently repeated falsehoods that is believed to be true. The truth is that very few doctors can receive revolving fund contributions; the rest, perhaps as victims of this myth, have to make do with their bare salaries.

Of course salaries are not the doctors' only problem. There is also a perception that, in the matter of personal rights, many rights not withheld from other professional groups are withheld from them, and this creates a justice deficit that overshadows the health revolution that has come about as a Turkish miracle.

Of course the matter of forming a legal or cultural shield that will protect doctors against the popular discourses developing against them, the discrediting rumors, and the risks caused by the unrestrained anger in our patient culture is also an important issue.

Without forgetting that it is not merely a development party but a justice party, the AK Parti should look at this issue again from the window of justice and carry out a special study on doctors.