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The government approved the Hungarian Medical Chamber’s proposal to increase wages over the weekend, and parliament has already nodded to the bill presented on Monday. Under the law, which was voted on at a stormy pace, doctors’ salaries will increase in three steps, by 120 percent, and reach full level in January 2023.
According to the new salary scale in Hungary, a rookie resident will earn 481,000 gross next year, which will rise to 687,000 gross in three years. The salary of a doctor who has been practicing for more than 41 years will rise to 1.6 million gross next year and 2.38 million gross from 2023. Prime Minister Viktor Orbán described the salary increase for Hungarian doctors as unprecedented .
It is difficult to say exactly how much you are looking for a doctor in Hungary today. According to the website Fizetesek.hu, the average gross monthly salary of a doctor is 546,540 guilders, but there can be big differences between medical salaries depending on who, since when, in what department and how much.
It is already known from the 2018 report of the State Health Center (ÁEEK) that in 2018 a doctor took home 709,792 gross monthly HUF. This amount in 2010 was 338 thousand HUF gross per month. If we take the individual jobs, the gross monthly salary of a beginner specialist was 656,302 HUF in 2018, while with ten years of employment it was possible to earn 805,557 HUF and with 20 years 853,500 HUF for 2 years, according to the data of ÁEEK. That is, the average gross monthly salary according to ÁEEK can be received by specialists in the field for 5-10 years. From this dataset, it is unclear how much on-call fee or surcharge will be paid for this.
The speaker of the chamber previously said that the current salary agreement was based on the salaries of Austrian doctors, and proposed 55 percent of them. Talking to Hungarian doctors working abroad, we tried to map the competitiveness of the new salaries.
Máté Halász works in Neunkirchen, Lower Austria, as an obstetrician-gynecologist candidate. He graduated from Hungary in June 2017 and two months later began his degree in Austria. “I was not solvent at home, they specifically laughed at the bank when they saw my draft employment contract, but I didn’t want to be completely separated from the country, so I moved to Sopron and went to work from there,” he wrote to hvg.hu . Three years ago, the basic salary in Hungary, starting as a general practitioner, was HUF 137,000 net, compared to HUF 2,172 net in Austria, calculated at the current exchange rate, HUF 780,654, and “from here come the supplements. He said, “Since then, the gap between the two basic salaries has only widened thanks to the foreign career model.”
There are few doctors
The Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) publishes a report in November each year on the health status of EU citizens and the performance of EU health systems. The latest post, Health at a Glance 2019, in 2019, shows that the proportion of healthcare workers in Hungary has hardly changed compared to the total number of employees, which is interesting because in 2017, for example, they graduated once and average more doctors than in 2009. Between 2009 and 2017, by the way, approximately 12,000 doctors graduated. The number of health workers is not only low in Hungary, it is typical throughout the Central and Eastern European region. The emigration of doctors plays an important role in this, thousands of doctors have also left Hungary, partly due to low wages.
Gabriella is a cardiologist and pulmonologist. Ten years ago, at the age of 46, she left her practice at the invitation of a hospital in southern Sweden and moved with her husband to the Scandinavian country due to financial problems, lack of quality free time and better working conditions. “How do we know how much money we can count each month without having to think of gratitude money or extra work so that we can earn a living from the payment we receive for work done in the workplace?” He explained to hvg.hu. Their starting salary while on probation was SEK 45,000, which almost doubled after 10 years of work.
“When I became a specialist and then a chief physician, there was always a bigger leap and, moreover, approx. An increase of 2.5 percent per year, ”he said, adding that their pension would be transferred to an individual account, they could decide to invest the money and they would be billed annually. Regarding the Swedish medical salary scale, a chief doctor takes home between SEK 75 and 90 thousand per month, that is, between 2.5 and 3 million gross guilders. In Hungary, a doctor has to work for 40 years to do this.
Hvg.hu obtained the salary table of a German state hospital valid as of January 2021, which can be considered general in Germany. According to this, the salary of a novice general practitioner is equivalent to 1,660,000 HUF per month, which increases to 1,757,000 after one year and 1,824,000 after two years. In comparison, according to the new salary scale, he is a novice doctor in Hungary. As of January 2021, you can receive HUF 481,486 gross, up from HUF 619,053 gross in 2022, up from HUF 687,837 gross in 2023. Salaries for specialists are also several times higher than those working in Hungary in Germany: they initially receive 2 million 194 thousand euros, and with three years of work experience they receive 2,378 thousand euros. And these are just the basic wages, in the case of a 40-hour-a-week job the on-call fee adds to that.
It’s not just money that matters
Miklós has been an obstetrician and gynecologist in Berlin for 9 years. He told hvg.hu that in 9 years he had acquired professional knowledge that Hungary would not have had the opportunity to do. “I like that gratitude money is an unfamiliar concept here and that doctors working in the public sector are also paid according to a transparent pay scale, which increases every few years. Of course, on-call services are also paid adequately and overtime can be taken as leave, ”he wrote, adding that he would not have brought him back to Hungary personally because of the increase in medical salaries in Hungary announced at the weekend. .
because after almost 10 years I spent here, I got used to the German system and mentality and I don’t think I can easily get used to Hungarian again.
In the other half of Europe, Greece, the base salary of novice doctors working in local care is around 1,200 euros, to which are added on-call fees. “Doctors still get about a month. Additional official fee of 200-300 EUR. Novice doctors working in the hospital, along with on-call services, will take approx. they earn 2,000 euros a month, ”said a Hungarian doctor who opened a private otolaryngology clinic in Corfu, who had previously worked in Budapest for 5 years and was motivated to move for personal reasons rather than money.
Australian doctors take home much more than that. A Hungarian doctor working in Australia earns 2-3 million guilders a month, including overtime, “not as a specialist, they don’t accept the European exam here.” On average, he works 60 to 65 hours a week, more on standby. “My plan was to go home next year. Earlier I turned down several job offers because I wanted to work in Hungary. However, in the current situation, I plan to establish or contact employment agencies for jobs in other countries.
Due to new legal regulations, I would not work as a practicing physician in Hungary.
– written by.
According to Hungarian doctors working in Austria, a salary increase is necessary, but it is not enough in itself for Hungarian doctors working abroad to return. According to them, the work environment, peer motivation, fringe benefits and infrastructure matter at least as much.
According to a Hungarian doctor working in Sweden, it is also very good that doctors can earn more in Hungary, but the measure alone is not enough to keep or get doctors back. We spoke with a Hungarian doctor who works in England as an entrepreneur who sees that if the government, as promised, liquidates the salaries of Hungarian GPs, “the 100 percent who offered us the salary will not even come close to the money given to the colleagues from the hospital, and we too will be able to lead, and they will be forced to establish communities of practice, especially in rural areas. ” This doctor, who also did not give his name in the conversation, passed the English GP exam in 2016 as a second Hungarian. Now the gross hourly wage is £ 80 to £ 90.
My monthly net income after general expenses and taxes is £ 5,000 with two weeks of work per month. I’ll be home for the other two weeks
He said.
© AFP / Lefteris Pitarakis
According to 2017 data from the British National Health Service, 1,187 Hungarians work in British healthcare. By the way, according to OECD data, most foreign doctors work in Ireland, the United Kingdom, the United States, Switzerland and Sweden. It is already known from the AEEK publication of 2019 that 743 Hungarian doctors applied for a permit to work abroad last year. Most of the young Hungarian doctors between the ages of 25 and 29 took advantage of this opportunity. Among them, the two most popular destinations are Germany and England. If we take the specialties, it is mainly internal medicine and anesthesiologists who have proposed, but there are also many pediatricians, general practitioners and surgeons who have applied abroad.
Miklós Kásler, Minister of Human Resources, previously spoke about the fact that the number of applicants for official certificates has been steadily decreasing since 2015, so he believes that emigration is also likely. However, this does not mean that it will stop. This summer, a survey was conducted by the Hungarian Medical Chamber regarding what medical students think about their professional vision. It turned out that more than half of them would go abroad due to low wages at home, and only a fifth of them would work exclusively in Hungarian public healthcare.
Gabriella Lantos, a health expert on hvg.hu’s public podcast Fülke, said she sees the new pay scale as a good direction, though she said “it is no longer enough for those who have already left to return.” However, according to him, many of the recent graduates will think that it will be worth staying in Hungary, because, as he said,
many baron doctors will resign so you can move more quickly in public care.
However, those who are already integrated into a German or French care system will not return. Not only because, with whom we spoke, without exception, they reported that it was tremendously difficult for them to fit in, they worked a lot and continue to work to this day. Many of them have reexamined vocational and language tests over 40 years old. One of them put it this way, “unfortunately here too the fence was not made of sausage”, but thought it was worth it despite the adversity.
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