Medical interns have petitioned the speaker of parliament to help them address their issues of deployment saying the money passed in the budget for the financial year 2023-2024 is to cater for arrears meaning in the next financial year, they are still left out.

The pre-medical interns say they have been waiting for gov’t to offer internships for one year. Earlier, a bigger group of Junior Doctors who were accompanied by senior medical personnels were blocked from accessing Parliament with placards and later the police allowed only 7 representative to deliver their petition to the Speaker's office.

While the shs 52.7 trillion budget estimates for the financial year 2023-2024, the finance minister Matia Kasaija revealed that at the ending the financial year, shs 22 billion was allocated to clearing arrears for medical intern doctors and senior house officers. A total of 8.5 billion shillings is required to pay 1,900 interns awaiting placement.However, there is a fresh lot and this makes the number 4,000.

According to medical interns, they are not contented with this because they are not being catered for the next financial year.

They have now decided to hold a peaceful demonstration heading to parliament so that they petition the speaker on this matter.

However, along Parliamentary Avenue in Kampala, police intercepted these pre-medical interns asking them to leave the place but all in vain.

The police later talked to them saying the speaker was aware of their visit and she provided a list of names for those to go see her which the interns refused as some of the names of those on the list were not interns.

They later agreed with police to choose among only seven members  to go and represent the team to the speaker as the rest who remained outside were chased away.

Among the issues they want to be addressed include the deployment of medical interns, they also want ministry of health to cancel what junior doctors termed “discriminative deployment” of interns, and also money for the next financial year for the interns to be released saying that this has left a big gap of lack of human resource in the health sector since most of the work is done by them.

It should be noted that earlier this month the ministry of health asked medical interns who can cater for their internship to register and start straight away as the rest wait for funds from the ministry of finance.

Catharine Birabwa