Doctors have rejected a proposed policy by the Ministry of Health that bars jobless health workers from seeking employment abroad without clearance.
KMPDU Secretary General Davji Atellah on Monday termed the policy as retrogressive, asking the government to give unemployed health workers jobs instead of blocking them from seeking green pastures in other countries.
"If the Ministry of Health and the government have not been able to get a policy that enforces hospitals to actually have health workers; doctors, nurses and clinical officers to offer services it is an injustice to then put a policy that stops those people from leaving the country and remaining unemployed,’’ Atellah said in an interview with the Star.
However, Health Cabinet Secretary Susan Nakhumicha defended the policy when she appeared before Parliament on Friday last week.
She told senators that the proposed workforce immigration policy will ensure government-to-government engagement for health workers who are seeking greener pastures abroad.
"We want an opportunity where we prepare fit for purpose for that country so that even as they go there they don’t get engaged in other things or they are not found to be unfit and it is better when we have a national migration policy,’’ CS Nakhumicha told senators.
However, KMPDU claimed that healthcare workers have not been involved in the process of coming up with such a policy that is yet to be implemented.
"ILO convention, 1997 states that migration of workers from one country to another should be accorded justice and with decency because it is a right," Atellah said.
"You cannot be blocked from leaving the country because you are an essential service provider.’’
The Private Employment Agencies Convention (No 181) of the ILO Convention (1997) states that workers who are placed or hired out by private employment agencies have access to freely chosen job opportunities, without discrimination.
It further states that their fundamental rights at work, including the right to join or form trade unions and the right to collective bargaining, are protected.
