Antalya Medical Chamber slams the cancellation of health workers’ annual leaves

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The Antalya Medical Chamber has criticized the cancellation of healthcare workers' annual leaves by the Antalya Governor's Office's Public Health Board amid the novel coronavirus (COVID-19) outbreak.

The Antalya Medical Chamber held a press conference in the Mediterranean city yesterday (August 11) and raised concerns that a decision aggrieving the healthcare workers has been taken instead of struggling against the pandemic or binding up people's wounds in the wake of the forest fires that had raged in several southern provinces for over 10 days.

"The burden of the outbreak cannot be solely on the shoulders of healthcare workers," underlined the Antalya Medical Chamber.

Referring to the selfless efforts of physician and healthcare workers despite their workload which has increased since the outbreak of the pandemic, their unsafe working conditions, insufficient personal equipment and violence in healthcare, the Chamber stressed that there is an attempt to seize the employee personal rights of physicians and other healthcare workers:

While there is injustice in additional payments and a failure to pay adequate wages, making them work more and depriving them of their right to take a leave of absence, which is their most natural right, is great injustice to exhausted healthcare workers; it is unacceptable.

'Board doesn't have such an authority'

With its decision dated August 9, the Public Health Board of the Antalya Governor's Office decided that until further notice, the annual leaves of all personnel (including the ones currently on leave) working at the Antalya Provincial Health Directorate and its affiliated institutions and organizations should be cancelled and new requests for annual leave should be halted.

The Public Health Board has also prolonged its decision allowing all healthcare personnel in Antalya to be made to work for 24 hours a day (which it took on August 30, 2020) until October 31, 2021.

Against this background, the Antalya Medical Chamber underlined that the Board does not have the authority to cancel the annual leaves, criticizing that no measure or decision has been taken by the Board against COVID-19 other than cancelling the leaves of healthcare personnel.

What is happening in Antalya?

The Medical Chamber raised concerns that in the last weeks, it has been frequently receiving feedback from both hospital and field workers about the insurmountability of the COVID-19 case numbers.

According to the Antalya Medical Chamber, "even though the official number of cases in this process was announced as having dropped from 75 to 72 per 100 thousand people a week, the fullness of hospitals and the business of healthcare workers make one think the opposite."

The Medical Chamber emphasized that the recent Public Health Board decision also explains what has been happening in Antalya.

Number of cases increasing every day

The Medical Chamber recalled that while the number of positive cases hit 2,700 a day last week, they are now hearing that the number of positive cases has reached 3,500-3,600 a day in Antalya these days.

"Considering that we cannot conduct sufficient tests, we can only quarantine the close contacts, we are having problems with testing the close contacts with symptoms at home and people avoid PCR tests due to isolation, we can say that our number of cases is much higher than these numbers. We cannot fully find or isolate the cases," the Chamber underlined.

Intensive care units are jam-full

Noting that there are now efforts to increase the bed capacity of the pandemic services and intensive care units at public hospitals in the province, the Antalya Medical Chamber raised concerns that the intensive care units are now jam-full in several hospitals:

"There are preparations to turn the dialysis units and intermediate intensive care units into COVID-19 intensive care units. Several intensive care units have reached full capacity. The private sector is asked for ventilators. Almost half of the intensive care patients are aged 30 to 50. Almost 90 percent of these cases are not vaccinated at all or not with the third dose."

Concluding the statement, the Antalya Medical Chamber asked the Ministry of Health a series of questions within this context. (KÖ/SD)