The government should increase audits and add a labor rights provision to the Medical Care Act (醫療法) to eliminate “slave contracts” for physicians, the Taipei Doctors’ Union said yesterday.
Ahead of National Doctors’ Day tomorrow, the union and Democratic Progressive Party Legislator Fan Yun (范雲) held a news conference at the Legislative Yuan in Taipei to raise awareness of unreasonable working conditions for medical professionals at hospitals.
An anonymous physician at a teaching hospital in Kaohsiung called in to the event to share his experience of being “trapped in an unfair contract,” adding that if he did not fulfill the contract, it would cost him more than he earns in five years at the hospital.
The doctor said that he assumed the position after his specialist training was complete.
The hospital not only failed to keep its promises made upon hiring him, but scheduled excessive rotating shifts and changed previously agreed upon hours, the physician said.
He ended up working 185 hours in two weeks, running between the main hospital and different rural clinics to which he was assigned under the contract, the physician said.
The exhaustion caused him to develop arrhythmia and high blood pressure, he added.
However, if he quit, he might be sued by the employer for more than NT$6 million (US$208,117) for breach of contract, more than his total salary from the previous five years, he said.
The Labor Standards Act (勞動基準法) protects regular workers from minimum service period agreements, but attending physicians have no such protection, union representative Tseng Pei-chi (曾培琪) said.
If terminated early, many of their contracts require them to repay twice the expenses and wages earned during their two-year training period, Tseng said, adding that this creates an extremely unreasonable work environment at hospitals.
This is not a unique case, union secretary-general Liao Yu-wen (廖郁雯) said, offering another example of a physician in Taipei.
Fed up with an unsuitable work environment, the doctor resigned, only to be faced with a NT$1 million breach-of-contract fine, even though the clinic did not provide any training or additional compensation, Liao said.
Doctors often cannot afford legal counseling, allowing employers to take advantage of them, she added.
After going through a lengthy training period, physicians are placed under harmful working conditions without hope of promotion, and their contracts prevent them from seeking new employers, Fan said.
Fan called on the Ministry of Health and Welfare to increase audits of healthcare provider, while also criticizing it for not following through on its promise to draft a new labor rights law.
The ministry announced the plan in April last year, but the legislature has yet to receive anything, she said, urging the government to send the draft soon so that doctors could be freed from “slave contracts.”
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