Belgium’s Doctors Go On Strike

Press, Volume CIII, Issue 30405, 2 April 1964, Page 13

Belgium’s Doctors Go On Strike

(N Z.P.A .-Reuter— Copyright >

BRUSSELS, April 1.

Belgian doctors today called a “total and unlimited strike” in protest at the Government’s health service plans.

Doctors claim the Government plan will curtail their freedom, abolish professional secrecy and impede the standards of medical treatment.

Representatives of the 12,000 doctors earlier met Cabinet Ministers and representatives of the country’s two powerful trade union organisations the Socialistled General Federation of Labour and the Social Christian Union Federation for 18 hours in an attempt to beat the midnight strike deadline.

The Government plan provides for a fixed scale of fees for all medical treatment and the granting of free medical treatment to certain categories of patients. Negotiators said the main stumbling block was what fees

should be paid to the doctors and how many afternoons a week they would be allowed for private practice. During the Easter holidays doctors from different parts of the country staged an unofficial warning strike under the name of “operation suitcase” when they walked out of their practices and went on vacation—most of them to Luxembourg, France and Holland. In readiness for the strike, the doctors had organised emergency services to deal with the most urgent cases. The doctors said they would wait abroad for the outcome of the negotiations. Observers in Brussels said many of them might remain abroad for the duration of the “medical war.”

A hint of possible action came with the news that at Charleroi, an important in-

dustrial centre in the south, workers’ committees had given orders to strike in protest against rumoured refusals by a number of local doctors to treat patients. The Government issued a communique in which it deplored the decision of the doctors’ unions “not to pursue the negotiations.”