Non-teaching doctors pitch for retirement age hike

Hyderabad: After government increased the retirement age of senior doctors working in government medical colleges and teaching hospitals from 58 years to 65 years, their colleagues in other health wings, particularly Vaidya Vidhana Parishad, are urging the government to extend the same facility to them also.

According to them, many senior doctors working in District and Area Hospitals and Community Health Centres (CHCs) and those in the administration wing have retired or on the verge of retirement in 2019 leaving open a number of vacancies.

No regular recruitments in the wing are also a problem. As many as 919 posts were filled in 2018, but prior to that permanent jobs were filled way back in 2008.

Of the new doctors who joined the service, nearly 100 of them have abstained for work for months together prompting senior officials to issue show-cause notices and then terminate most of them.

This meant a good number of hospitals in districts are functioning with shortage of doctors.