Paraguay doctors confirm strike starting next Tuesday

RIO DE JANEIRO, BRAZIL – “The protest will take place on September 28, because although we were invited to a tripartite meeting with the Ministry of Labor, doctors are still determined to demonstrate,” said National Doctors Union president Rossana Gonzalez.

The doctors’ demand is not new, but has been pressing for several years and, despite the efforts to solve the problem, the Ministry of Health is failing to comply with the agreement signed in June this year, the union leader added.

“Doctors spend between 10 and 15 years in training and the demands, as I have always argued, have been ongoing for the past 10 years,” she pointed out, while calling for equal pay for other professionals who work alongside doctors with the same working hours and workload.

Some 2,500 doctors working in the same place are in a situation of labor injustice, with the same training as others but with different salaries, the National Doctors’ Union president explained to the press recently.

As a consequence of Covid-19, thousands of Paraguayans in mid-March protested in the capital and other cities for over a week against corruption and the mismanagement of the pandemic, as well as calling for the resignation of President Mario Abdo and his vice-president Hugo Velázquez.

Since then, doctors have taken to the streets at least once a month, the last time in late August, to demand fair working hours, support for treatment and patient care, among other claims.