Contract nurses staged a protest at Koti DME hospital in Hyderabad on Friday, demanding regularisation and salary hike. The protest, which started at 8 am, went on till 2 pm. It ended as the police intervened and detained the protesters. Around 50 protesters were detained by the Sultan Bazar police and later released.
There are about 220 outsourced nurses at Gandhi Hospital who have been working since 2007 and receive a salary of Rs 15,000 after deductions.
In a representation to the Telangana Health Minister Eatala Rajender, they said: “In view of the pandemic, we are putting our lives in highly risky positions. We are frontline workers getting infected with COVID-19. In this context, we are requesting you to consider and regularise our services.”
Regularisation has been a long-pending demand for the nurses, and they had earlier made appeals to hospital authorities and the Health Department. In April, the nurses boycotted their duties for a day in protest.
Their dissent, however, grew louder after three of outsourced nurses tested positive for coronavirus.
According to sources, some family members of the nurses, including spouses and children, also tested positive. Some were admitted in Gandhi Hospital when their health condition got critical.
“We are doing all this for Rs 15,000 and a job which they can remove us from any time,” Lakshmi, who tested positive on June 23, told TNM.
“We are risking ourselves and our families in order to serve the COVID-19 patients and we should be given our due credit. Amid the lockdown, several of our spouses have lost their income. How are we supposed to run our family with such a low amount, while putting everybody’s life at risk,” she asked.
