Nurses across Iran have been protesting for a second week, with pickets spreading to several more hospitals, according to Iranian media.
The protests began at the hospitals of Karaj near the capital Tehran, but quickly spread to other cities including Shiraz, Jahrom, Zanjan, Yazd, Arak, and Mashhad. Protests focus on the lack of proper implementation of nurse payment tariffs, forced overtime, long shifts, and low overtime pay.
A typical Iranian nurse earns about $200 a month, partly due to the depreciation of the Iranian rial against the dollar. This, in turn, has forced many nurses to leave Iran for other countries, including Canada, France, and Australia.
The growing number of emigration has added to the workload of the remaining staff, who are not adequately compensated for the added pressure and long hours. There are currently about 240,000 nurses working across the country, but that number needs to triple to meet the standard nurse-patient ratio, which is only getting worse as Iran continues to age.
Heavy workloads and poor working conditions are forcing nurses to emigrate, resign or, in more tragic cases, commit suicide. According to reports, some 3,000 nurses have emigrated in the last year. One nurse said:
Now that we are on strike, instead of responding, they are endangering the lives of patients by using unprofessional replacement forces in hospitals, and protesting nurses are being threatened with dismissal and salary cuts.
The nursing community was outraged by the government’s response, criticising officials for reducing their demands to merely addressing payment arrears, while their real demands are at a higher level: uncompromising and non-discriminatory implementation of the law.
Government’s response
In response to the escalating situation, Iran’s Supreme National Security Council gave the Ministry of Health a three-day deadline to collect and report on the problems faced by the nursing community. However, union representatives are sceptical about the Ministry’s ability to adequately represent the interests of nurses.
Mohammad Sharifi Moghaddam, secretary general of Nurse’s Home, a guild association, says the Ministry of Health is pursuing a policy dominated by doctors and neglecting the rights of medical staff.
“Health ministry staff, from top to bottom, are all doctors. How can they understand the situation of a nurse who earns a monthly salary of $200 and receives $2 for a 7-hour overtime night shift, deposited into their account after several months of delay?”
After days of unprecedented strikes, the nursing community expected new president Masoud Pezeshkian, who is himself a surgeon, to send a representative to listen to their demands, Moghaddam said.
But they ignored the protests again and did not hear the nurses’ voices. The Ministry of Health is part of the problem. Those who are themselves part of the problem cannot represent nurses’ demands to the Supreme National Security Council.
As a result, the Ministry of Health was directed to provide a summary of nurses’ problems and solutions within three days. It was decided that necessary action would be taken based on the three-month reports to address the problems of the nurses.
However, the decision does not seem to have appeased the disgruntled nurses whose protests continue to spread across the country.
