Medical lab technicians go on strike over workload and wages
Week after nurses forced into arbitration with Health Ministry and ordered to call off labor action, other staff take up protest
Thousands of lab technicians in medical centers across the country launched a strike on Thursday over their working conditions.
Some 3,000 medical staff were involved in the labor action, seeking higher pay and a reduced workload.
As a result of the strike affecting hospital labs and Clalit medical centers, blood and urine tests would not be administered on Thursday, Channel 13 reported, and some disruptions were possible in surgery wards.
The protest comes a week after the Tel Aviv Labor Court ordered nurses to end a two-day strike and return to work while negotiating with the Health Ministry to reduce their workload.
The nurses are protesting what they say are poor working conditions and heavy caseloads amid a manpower shortage and low standards of care. The court decision permitted the nurses to continue with minor acts of protests, such as refusing to perform nonessential tests such as computerizing records, but also maintained the ministry could reduce their salaries accordingly, according to reports.
A recent report by the Taub Center for Social Policy Studies in Israel said that Israel’s health system has been subject to systemic failures in planning, budgeting and regulation by the government, resulting in an acute shortage of beds, inefficiencies and gaps in accessibility of treatment.
The report found that the country lags behind others in the 36-member Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) in number of hospital beds, and has shorter hospital stays and particularly high occupancy rates.
In Israel, the number of hospital beds per 1,000 people is 2.2 versus 3.6 in the OECD. While the number of beds is trending down in most countries, the decline is especially sharp in Israel — a 22 percent decline versus an OECD average of 15% between 2002 and 2017.
The shorter average hospitalization time in Israel — about five days per patient in contrast to an average of 6.7 days among all OECD countries — and the high occupancy rate, about 94% versus an average of 75% in the OECD, diminishes hospitals’ ability to handle emergencies and points to a potentially lower level of treatment quality, the report said.
The Times of Israel Community.