Over 70 per cent of medics have joined a nation-wide protest on Monday, said the Bulgarian Medical Association (BMA). They said the protests are for protesting patients' right to access to quality medical services, BTA reports.

At most places the protesting doctors discontinued work for an hour. This does not apply to emergencies. At other places the protesters only wore badges.

According to the Health Ministry, there were no protests are the country's most important hospitals.

Citing its local chapters, BMA said that medics are protesting across the country and the rate of participation is between 70 and 100 per cent. Some 95 per cent of the general practitioners and 90 per cent of the medics in pre-hospital health care have joined in.

According to BMA, the doctors of the university hospitals in Sofia, Stara Zagora and Varna would not allow protests and yet medics in some clinics supported the strike.

The BMA protests got the support of the Bulgarian Pharmaceutical Union which issued a declaration on that on Monday.

The Health Ministry told BTA that the work day started and went normally at the university hospitals and the regional hospitals. There were no protesting medics in the regions of Pernik, Pazardjik, Razgrad, Silistra, Stara Zagora, Shoumen, Vidin, Veliko Turnovo and Varna.

In an interview on Darik Radio, Health Minister Radoslav Gaidarski said that the individual groups of protesters are rarely bigger than 10-15 people and the nation-wide protest was in the imagination of the BMA leadership.

In a declaration on the protests, the medical chapter of the Confederation of Independent Trade Unions in Bulgaria (CITUB), says that while the resources available for health care are
really limited, the ongoing strike has no capacity to help increase them because the budget of the National Medical Insurance Fund for this year has already been approved.

Speaking to the press in Vratsa where he attended the unveiling of a refurbished hospital ward, Health Minister Gaidarski said that it is ridiculous to say that the health system is faced with bankruptcy. "We managed to secure 400 million leva more this year than last year," he argued.

He also said that nobody has used any pressure on the doctors to talk them out of striking. "This is a democratic country and everybody is free to express their protests," he commented.

The Health Minister added that no small population place will see its hospital closed due to shortage of medical staff. A regulation is being prepared to allow internists to practice in another field they have acquired. The restriction for GPs to practice another specialty should be scrapped, especially in small towns and villages where specialists are very few, he said.

He added that they are determined to keep a new requirement which prevents specialists from working in more than one hospital - and which is strongly opposed by physicians. The restriction does not apply only to rare specialties.