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International Internet Magazine. Baltic States news & analytics Friday, 26.04.2024, 22:34

Audit: pay system in Latvian Stradins Hospital is unfair

BC, Riga, 11.11.2020.Print version
The pay system in Pauls Stradins Clinical University Hospital (Stradisn Hospital) in Latvia is not fair, the State Audit Office has concluded, informs LETA.

State auditors examined the hospital's pay system to determine if the salaries of the hospital's administration and staff have increased in recent years. 


The auditors came to the conclusion that as far as this particular hospital is concerned, remuneration rules there have been unfair, incomprehensible and untraceable. Moreover, the additional funding allocated to the hospital in 2018-2019 has only increased the already existing gap between the lowest and highest salaries. 


The auditors' findings have revealed that the pay system in Stradins Hospital is not fair and the principles for determining pay grades are not comprehensible and transparent. 


The State Audit Office notes that employees with identical job descriptions receive starkly different salaries, with the difference in some cases  reaching even 200%.


"After pay raises in 2018 and 2019, the already preexisting significant differences in remuneration only increased, which has not contributed to the equalization of salaries," the state auditors said.


Furthermore, the state auditors indicate that to a large extent the salaries that are paid to the hospital's senior staff depend not on the basic salary but various additional payments and other remuneration elements, the allocation of which is impossible to trace. Depending on the structural unit, these additional payments can rage from 0.4 percent to 70 percent of the employee's total salary. 


Although the auditors concluded that overall the salaries of the hospital's medical staff have increased and the basic pay for physicians, nurses and nurses' assistants exceed the minimum pay grade, due to the existing differences and discrepancies in the remuneration structure it was not possible to ascertain that the additional funding allocated to the hospital has been used to raise the lowest salaries and the limitation on pay raises for salaries exceeding EUR 4,012 per month has been observed. 






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