27 General Practitioners, 10 specialists appointed

Twenty-seven General Practitioners and ten specialists have been appointed under the Ministry of Health’s arrangement to hire temporary doctors in just less than two months.

This has been made possible through the strengthened partnership between the Ministry of Health and Medical Services and the Fiji College of General Practitioners.

Minister for Health and Medical Services Rosy Akbar says the arrangement is one of the key strategies undertaken by the Ministry to reduce the patient waiting time.

Akbar says the deploying of temporary doctors during peak operating hours in major health facilities around Fiji is well in progress.

She says based on the current arrangements, the General Practitioners are paid a rate of $50 while specialists are paid $80.

Akbar says they had initially started the arrangement at the Nadi Hospital and at the moment we have six temporary General Practitioners and one specialist at Namaka health centre.

Akbar says the Ministry has also received a few expression of interests by General Practitioners to start work at Ba Mission Hospital and it is progressing quite well.

Akbar says this arrangement has to continue till they are able to ease the doctor shortages. 

She says the Ministry is encouraging more General Practitioners to come on board as the rate they are giving them is quite lucrative and they need their services as well during the peak operating hours.

Akbar says this arrangement reduces the workload off the doctors in the hospitals and give them more time to focus on patient care and it also reduces the waiting time for patients thus complaints on the waiting hours have dropped.

She says this initiative also broadens the networking between the doctors in hospitals and the General Practitioners in terms of sharing information for enhanced collaboration.

Through this new arrangement, the Ministry of Health has reached out to the CWM Hospital, Lautoka and Labasa Hospitals, Makoi Health Centre, Samabula Health Centre, Lami Health Centre, Raiwaqa Health Centre and Valelevu Health Centre, Tamavua Twomey, St Giles, Nadi, Sigatoka, Namaka and Ba health facilities to ease the patient waiting hours.

The services provided majorly are in Accident and Emergency Units, Paediatric Unit, Anesthetic, Physician, Obstetrics and Gynecology, Eye Unit and Dermatology.