Women doctors refusing to report to their workplace

11/09/2008

Some 100 married women trained in university hospitals in Rabat and Casablanca are refusing to serve in remote locations, following a government decision designed to ensure the provision of care in the regions.

By Sarah Touahri, for Magharebia in Rabat – 11/09/08

[Sarah Touahri] A group of married specialist doctors are protesting remote placements. Morocco's health ministry says they are needed to provide care in the regions.

A group of 100 new women doctors held a sit-in outside the health ministry on Tuesday (September 9th) to protest remote workplace assignments. Their refusal to honour their contracts has sparked a major debate in Morocco.

Trained as specialists in the university hospitals of Rabat and Casablanca, these women are married, and most of them have children.

A rule allowing graduates to be deployed within a 100-km radius of their marital homes has been replaced this year with a drawing system in order to put an end to shortages in the south and east.

The women, however, are demanding to have the old rule applied, with priority given to those who are married, rather than putting them on an equal footing with single people. The health ministry maintains that appointments should be made according to regional needs without taking anything else into consideration.

Doctor Abou El Ouafa Manal told Magharebia that the drawing was carried out in the absence of those concerned.

"While waiting for a dialogue to be opened up with the ministry, we were suddenly surprised to find that we were being deployed to regions far away, with no consideration for our family circumstances," she said. "We have children, and some are on the point of having babies."

The health ministry disagrees.

"Being a married woman is no reason for exemption from the new rule," the ministry's communications department said. "These women belong to a group of 327 newly-qualified doctors, 210 of whom have already reported to their workplace."

Without the new appointment system, the ministry says, there would be no hope of equal care provision across the whole of Morocco. The women in question have been given two years’ seniority bonus to give them a boost in their next appointment.

The ministry added the women protesting the new move will have to wait their turn, because other married women have been serving in remote locations such as Laâyoune for two or three years, and their relocations will be finalized before the new graduates' demands can be considered.

"They have signed an eight-year contract to work for the ministry, and not necessarily near where they live," said the health ministry’s director of personnel affairs, Mohamed Kably.

"They can ask to be moved after a year," he added, saying that it is not possible to continue sending women only to the area between Casablanca and Rabat when needs exist in other regions.

Mohammed Ben Youssef, a member of the national health federation and of the General Union of Moroccan Workers (UGTM) told Magharebia that the unions cannot defend the position taken by the protesting doctors because other women doctors have been working for years in distant areas, far from their marital homes.

To defend their cause, the women have organised themselves into a collective. In what they say is the only definitive solution to the issue, they plan to press for the establishment of faculties of medicine and university hospitals across the various regions of the country.