site.btaOn Professional Holiday, Healthcare Providers Protest over Low Pay

On their professional holiday, May 12, healthcare providers, including nurses, midwives, lab workers, physical therapists and feldshers, held a rally to protest low pay and demand a 150% increase of average wages in the public sector. The protest was organized by the Trade Union of Healthcare Providers. 

May 12 is International Nurses Day. 

The protest took place outside the Health Ministry and briefly disrupted traffic.

Union leader Maya Ilieva said that the demand for wage increase is for all healthcare providers. As she spoke at the rally, she said that there are enough spots for trainees in the nursing programmes but very few students are willing to take up such a career because nurses are notoriously underpaid. She pointed out that the starting wage for a nurse is way below that of somebody taking up a job in a supermarket. The lack of career prospects and financial security are the main factors that make a nursing career unattractive, Ilieva added. 

Bulgaria is facing a severe shortage of nurses.

The union are calling for setting in place standards for medical care to include nursing standards. In Ilieva's words, such standards have been prepared but are locked up in the cabinet in the Health Minister's office because if they get approved, existing hospitals will be unable to meet them. 

Bulgaria has no more than 23,000 nurses and some 11,000 of them work in hospitals. 

Ileva slammed the Bulgarian Medical Association for protesting against a proposal that would allow nursing and midwife practices to be financed directly by the National Health Insurance Fund (NHIF).

The Medical Association, which is the professional organization of doctors, has called the proposal "an unadvisable, risky, and poorly justified intervention in the healthcare system".

According to Ilieva, the Medical Association are opposed to having nurse practices only if they are funded by the NHIF - because such practices exist even now but are not directly funded by NHIF, and the Medical Association did not mind that.

The protestors expected to meet with the Health Minister.

Earlier in the day, Health Minister Silvi Kirilov put out a congratulatory address where he wrote: "Always there, on the front line, close to doctors, for decades nurses have affirmed their place as loyal partners in the fight for patients' health. Effective healthcare is unthinkable without your competent work. [...] You are an integral part of everyone's existence – from their first breath of life to their last, despite the compromises it costs you and despite the imperfections of the system. For this resilience and unreserved commitment, which are expressions of your high professionalism, please accept my sincere gratitude." 

Commenting the healthcare providers' protest, the Minister said that "there are imbalances and we are working on those". He recalled that by a parliamentary decision of August 12, 2024, a strategy is being prepared. "Nursing will become a protected profession. A lot of work is to be done. As we have talked about it, we are raising the image of this profession. A final decision is not made yet. The Education Ministry will propose [legislative] changes to the government and Parliament," he said during a visit to Ruse, on the Danube.