No deal over doctors’ pay after mammoth meeting

The state health services organisation (Okypy) and doctors failed to reach an agreement on Wednesday after a mammoth meeting to discuss pay incentives for state hospital doctors.

The meeting between Okypy and doctors’ union Pasyki and the Pasydy doctors’ branch began at noon.

The failure to reach an agreement came when the unions said that they did not have the terms of reference from an audit firm that had conducted a study on their incentives for Okypy.

In a statement after the meeting, Pasyki head Sotiris Koumas said that, as far as the study is concerned, Pasyki received answers from the representative of the firm that conducted the study, but not its terms of reference.

“It is our belief now that we have been vindicated in terms of the positions we stated in the previous days,” he said.

“Okypy received the part of the study that it felt was in its favour,” he said.

This, he explained, “means that they recognise that there is a mistake somewhere in what they have accepted and approved”, adding that “they should be just towards the doctors.”

For his part, the head of the doctors’ branch of Pasydy Moises Lambrou, expressed his satisfaction with what the audit firm said in the sense that the way in which the firm perceived its mandate was roughly what it had insisted on in recent days.

However, he said, “the mandate given to them by the Okypy itself, based on the contract of employment in which they wrote, left them no room to present anything different.”

“We remained in dialogue on the issue of formulating some other, possibly alternative, proposal, which in essence will bring about the end of this whole process, which is going on indefinitely,” he said.

The meeting followed ongoing tensions between doctors and Okypy over the results of a study on the 2023 financial incentives. Okypy had proposed a budget of €4.1 million in July, which the doctors disputed, prompting the commissioning of an independent study.

In a July meeting that saw the participation of Health Minister Michael Damianos, Okypy representatives, and doctors’ unions, it was agreed that a new framework for the 2024-2026 agreement would be negotiated, with Damianos acting as a mediator and the Cyprus Medical Association as an observer.

Additionally, proposals made by the Okypy board on June 25, linking financial incentives to the organisation’s revenues, were withdrawn.

As far as the financial incentives for 2023 are concerned, it was decided that an independent, mutually accepted financial firm would review the data based on the existing agreement, with its findings being binding for all parties involved.

The dispute revolves around the doctors’ pay. They claim that Okypy has ‘cheated’ on reimbursing them for work done in 2023 by arbitrarily interpreting an agreement in place that concerns remuneration based on an incentives system.

Doctors receive two types of incentives – horizontal (given to all) and vertical (based on performance). Overtime is part of the horizontal incentives.

A few days ago, it was revealed that the study showed the owed amount for the 2023 horizontal incentives was €2.5 million, which the doctors disputed.

In their statement following Wednesday’s meeting, Okypy assured that the €2.5 million was the correct number, and that the organisation would move forward with paying that sum.

They called on the doctors to renew their contracts for 2024 and added that the doctors all had the study by the audit office in front of them.

A new meeting has been slated for September, with the deadline for the framework’s approval being October 31.