Moroccan female doctors continue protest against remote assignments

10/11/2008

Female doctors in Morocco are protesting a change in policy that allows them to be assigned to jobs far away from their families. The health ministry says there is no solution on the horizon.

By Sarah Touahri for Magharebia in Rabat – 10/11/08

[Sarah Touahri] Morocco's female doctors reject having to choose between work and family.

Female doctors newly assigned to work in remote areas of Morocco as part of a new regionalisation strategy refuse to return to work, despite a protracted showdown with the health ministry. The women, who study for up to 14 years after high school, do not want to be forced to choose between their job and having a family.

Under a previous rule, young female graduates who were married were guaranteed assignments within 65 miles of their homes. This rule is no longer being applied, leaving young doctors to depend on a random draw that takes no account of personal family situation.

A representative of the health ministry's communications department told Magharebia there is no solution on the horizon; it has suspended the women's salaries from November onwards. A number of sit-ins held outside the ministry to protest the remote assignments have had no effect.

Nephrologist Maha Benjelloun, who is one of 101 specialists included in the protest, told Magharebia that they have already received their wages for October and that they will have to wait until the end of this month to see whether the Ministry of Health will indeed carry out its threat.

No matter what the ministry does, she said, her fellows are not prepared to give in and sacrifice their family lives. "We'll go on campaigning even if they stop our wages; we have no choice."

Dr. Benjelloun lives in Casablanca but was assigned to work in Oujda, 440 miles from her home. She has two children, a nine-year-old son and a three-year-old daughter, and already spent five years working in an outlying district 20 miles from Khouribga. She is not prepared to be moved away from her family again, she said.

Her story is rather like that of Nadia El Attar, a specialist in internal medicine who was already separated from her husband and children in Oujda when studying in Rabat. She was then assigned to work in Laayoune, 1,250 miles from her marital home.

"I know I have a duty to care for my patients, but I also have a duty to be a mother to my two daughters: Manar, who's four, and Nour, who's four months," she said with tears in her eyes.

The Ministry of Health says it is essential to provide access to healthcare throughout Morocco, eliminating gaps in coverage. For this reason, the ministry claims, being female is not a reason to turn down a job in a rural area.

Health Minister Yasmina Baddou has said that women doctors are able to exercise their right to transfer after one year's practice, adding that in addition to the right to be moved after one year, they also obtain the benefits of two to three years' service. The minister revealed that 50 married female doctors from the 2007 class have returned to their jobs in outlying towns.

The group of protesters says these were married women who were able, by virtue of the draw, to obtain jobs within 65 miles of their homes if they were not assigned to the towns where their husbands worked.

"Some have husbands whose jobs enabled them to be with their wives in the locations to which they were assigned," said one demonstrator. "A very small number were obliged to move away from their husbands and children for purely financial reasons, out of fear that their wages would be stopped – those with mortgages to pay, for example. Most of them have been badly mentally affected and are depressed."

The protesters have criticised the so-called "twinship" criterion. Three of the protesting women have been reassigned on the grounds that they are the mothers of twins aged under 18 months.