Temp medical workers rally
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About 100 medical workers yesterday staged a protest to demand that the Public Health Ministry give them positions as civil servants, as they have been working as temporary employees for five years.
A group of medical workers including medical-record librarians and audio-visual staff submitted a petition to the ministry.
These workers were recruited by the ministry to work at state hospitals, but they were hired as temporary employees, not government officers.
Earlier, the government approved more than 21,000 civil-servant positions for the Public Health Ministry. But none of these positions was allocated for medical-record librarians and audio-visual staff.
“This is not fair,” said Vinai Suphapphot, a medical-record librarian at Ayutthaya province’s Sena District Hospital.
The ministry’s deputy permanent secretary, Dr Suphan Srithamma, said it would upgrade them from temporary employees to permanent ministry employees, rather than give them civil-servant status, because the ministry has to place more than 21,000 temporary employees in civil-servant positions as per a previous decision by the government. It will consider later whether to upgrade the temporary employees to civil servants.
