{"id":43100,"date":"2020-07-01T04:22:55","date_gmt":"2020-07-01T04:22:55","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/qatar-news.org\/qatarnewsEn\/?p=43100"},"modified":"2020-07-01T04:22:55","modified_gmt":"2020-07-01T04:22:55","slug":"tunisia-coalition-faces-pressure-over-pm-conflict-of-interest-allegations","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/qatar-news.org\/qatarnewsEn\/?p=43100","title":{"rendered":"Tunisia coalition faces pressure over PM conflict of interest allegations"},"content":{"rendered":"
\n

\nBAGHDAD:\u00a0Unpaid salaries, mask shortages, threats from patients\u2019 families \u2014 doctors across Iraq are cracking under such conditions, just as they face a long-feared spike in coronavirus cases.<\/p>\n

\n\u201cWe\u2019re collapsing,\u201d said Mohammed, a doctor at a COVID-19 ward in Baghdad who did not use his full name so he could speak freely.<\/p>\n

\n\u201cI just can\u2019t work anymore. I can\u2019t even focus on the cases or the patients,\u201d he said at the end of a 48-hour shift.<\/p>\n

\nIraq has officially registered more than 47,000 coronavirus cases, with doctors increasingly infected.<\/p>\n

\n\u201cI personally know 16 doctors who caught it over the last month,\u201d Mohammed said.<\/p>\n

\nThe country\u2019s overall death toll is heading toward 2,000, with official daily fatalities starting to top 100 in the past week \u2014 and doctors warn they cannot keep up.<\/p>\n

\nIn the autonomous Kurdish north, a surge in coronavirus infections has pushed the number of cases there to over 5,000 \u2014 including at least 200 health workers \u2014 and the death toll to more than 160.<\/p>\n

\nThe line at the public Ali Naji Hospital in the northeastern city of Sulaimaniyah wound out the door, with dozens of people queueing to get tested \u2014 but inside, the medical staff was thinner than ever.<\/p>\n

\nThe Kurdish regional government, like federal authorities in Baghdad, is struggling to pay public sector wages this year due to a collapse in oil prices and an economic recession brought on by the pandemic.<\/p>\n

\nThat has had a devastating effect on personnel at state-owned medical facilities, who have not been paid in two months.<\/p>\n

\nExhausted, thousands of health care workers at state hospitals in the Kurdish region announced earlier this month they would stop treating non-coronavirus cases.<\/p>\n

\n\u201cAt least 20,000 health care workers across the region are adhering to this partial strike,\u201d said Hawzin Othman, the head of Sulaimaniyah\u2019s medical syndicate.<\/p>\n

\nAmong them are 800 doctors who joined over the past two weeks, just as the Kurdish region began logging an uptick in COVID-19 cases.<\/p>\n

\nShevan Kurda, a 30-year-old doctor, is one of them.<\/p>\n

\n\u201cWe\u2019re working 10-hour shifts every day, but only to treat COVID-19 patients,\u201d said Kurda, who represents Sulaimaniyah\u2019s Medical Residents Syndicate.<\/p>\n

\nKurda is owed three months of wages from 2019 and was not paid in either April or May this year.<\/p>\n

\nAuthorities and health workers across Iraq have long decried the state of the country\u2019s dilapidated hospitals, worn down by years of war, a lack of investment and corruption that has sapped funds meant for new equipment.<\/p>\n

\nEven Prime Minister Mustafa Al-Kadhemi told reporters last week: \u201cWe do not have a health system.<\/p>\n

\n\u201cThe health system is broken, and the most basic requirements are not available, because those who hold positions in some state institutions are incompetent. This has been accumulating for years.\u201d<\/p>\n

\nIraq is also a notoriously dangerous place to be a doctor, as patients\u2019 families are known to threaten medical staff \u2014 sometimes with death \u2014 if their loved one\u2019s condition deteriorates.<\/p>\n

\nThis week, Iraq\u2019s medical syndicate declared a strike across the southern province of Dhi Qar after a female doctor was assaulted by a patient\u2019s relative.<\/p>\n

\nIn the capital Baghdad, doctors at several inundated coronavirus wards said they and their colleagues were on the brink of burnout, and complained of a long-standing lack of compensation for overtime.<\/p>\n

\n\u201cThere was no bonus for doctors working in field hospitals during the war against the Daesh group,\u201d said Ammar Falah, a 27-year-old medic at one of the city\u2019s coronavirus wards.<\/p>\n

\n\u201cThere was no bonus when there was mass mobilization for protests in October,\u201d he said, referring to anti-government demonstrations that began late last year and left over 550 people dead.<\/p>\n

\n\u201cYou think they\u2019re going to give us a bonus now just because we\u2019re taking on more hours?\u201c<\/p>\n

\nFalah said the Al-Kindi Training Hospital where he works distributed just five N95 masks to doctors each month.<\/p>\n

\nBut with so much interaction with infected patients, Falah said he needed to switch masks much more often and had begun using his $750 monthly take-home pay to buy protective gear.<\/p>\n

\n\u201cIf the hours go up more or the workload increases, we\u2019ll go on strike too,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

BAGHDAD:\u00a0Unpaid salaries, mask shortages, threats from patients\u2019 families \u2014 doctors across Iraq are cracking under such conditions, just as they face a long-feared spike in coronavirus cases. \u201cWe\u2019re collapsing,\u201d said Mohammed, a doctor at a COVID-19 ward in Baghdad who did not use his full name so he could speak freely. \u201cI just can\u2019t work…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":10,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-43100","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-spotlight_news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/qatar-news.org\/qatarnewsEn\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/43100","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/qatar-news.org\/qatarnewsEn\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/qatar-news.org\/qatarnewsEn\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/qatar-news.org\/qatarnewsEn\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/10"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/qatar-news.org\/qatarnewsEn\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=43100"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/qatar-news.org\/qatarnewsEn\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/43100\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/qatar-news.org\/qatarnewsEn\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=43100"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/qatar-news.org\/qatarnewsEn\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=43100"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/qatar-news.org\/qatarnewsEn\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=43100"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}