Medical Interns have to wait for a short while to get a fat pay

By; Gideon Peter Ssebulime

20^th November 2019

Ministry of Health requires an additional 2 billion shillings for medical interns.

The Minister of State for Primary Health Care, Dr Joyce Moriku made the statement on Tuesday while appearing before the parliamentary health committee to respond to issues as in the petition by the Federation for Uganda Medical Interns.

The interns want a minimum pay of shillings 3 million instead of the current 940,000. They argue that each intern gets a net pay of shillings 750,000 which is not commensurate with the services they provide in the 39 accredited internship centres.

However, the minister, Dr Moriku says that the ministry cannot pay interns more than a million shillings because of a budget shortfall.

She says that the ministry is fast-tracking the supplementary request so that Ministry of Finance presents it to Parliament next week.

She told the committee that the Ministry of Finance allocated the ministry shillings 11.4 billion for 1,000 medical interns in the 2019/2020 internship period. However, there are currently 1,170 medical interns who have been deployed and therefore, the ministry would require a total of shillings 13.5 billion for allowances, induction trainings and support supervision.

She also revealed that Starting February 2020, women with excess breast milk and would love to donate to babies whose mothers cannot breast feed will deposit it at the Human Breast Milk bank in Nsambya hospital.

Dr. Joyce Moriku explained that most of the equipment has been installed and, what remains are to panel beat a few things for the unit to start operating by February 2020.