Prime Minister Edi Rama met with a group of young boys and girls in the southern city of Fier, who were newly hired on full-time contracts in the public healthcare service and the private sector companies through the national employment service mediation. They have re-entered the labour market and many of them travel considerable to work in the city of Fier.
The young participants, many of them former emigrants who have returned home recently, shared their job-seeking experiences and how they succeeded in finding a job through the help of the employment service offices. “I used to work in the construction sector in Greece and I migrated to two other countries as well. I came back home a year and a half ago. For around a year I was jobless. Then I addressed to the employment service. Within a week, I received a phone call, asking me to go for a job interview. I am currently working at a logistics company engaged in the construction of the Trans-Adriatic Pipeline,” one of the participants said.
While one of the girls, recently employed in the private sector, has decided to work and live in Fier, although her family resides in Durres. “I am graduated in environmental engineering. I work in one of TAP project companies. I come from Durres. I first applied at the national employment service and I was hired at a construction materials laboratory where I worked one year. Now I have moved to work and live here in Fier. Working for foreign companies helps us a lot professionally. It teaches us with new standards that will help us in the future.”
Healthcare is one of the sectors recently meeting its needs for specialist doctors who not long ago saw overseas employment as the best possible option. Young girls and boys recently employed in the public health sector say their desire is to work in suburban, rural, and remote areas as they desperately need physicians and medical personnel and as they often have more difficulty accessing health services. “I’m a doctor. I received the due the license this January. I submitted application and the required documents and a month later I started work. I applied to work at the Libofsha health centre. I come from Fier, but I wanted to work in the suburbs. I think there is more need for doctors in the suburban areas,” one of the young doctors said.
But she is not the only one to do so. “I am a physician too. I was graduated in 2016. I applied for a job in January this year. I am now working at the healthcare centre in the village of Zhupan. I handed over the required documentation first and I started work just ten days later.”
Encouraging the young participants for their choices, the Premier said that the government has employed the right mechanism to support and provide incentives for the young doctors to work in the areas in greater need of help.
“We have provided incentives and bonus payments for every specialist doctors who agree to take up jobs and work at hospitals outside Tirana. It is a bonus that guarantees a salary equal to what they earn if working abroad. There are several cases of doctors who have returned home from Germany, Italy and have joined this program. All hospitals and other health care clinics will complete their staff needs step by step and finally tackle an inherent huge problem, which had not been solved for years. It’s a cost to the budget, but it’s virtually a major transformation and an indispensability to meet hospitals’ needs, as all the specialists gathered here in Tirana and situation in regional hospitals was very bad.
As for the perspective of health centers, the Prime Minister said: “300 healthcare centres that need ground-based reconstruction have been identified. 80 of them will be rebuilt this year. I believe the whole system of health centers will be completely different from the standpoint of conditions, basic instruments, but also in terms of supply of doctors, nurse and other medical staff within this term in office.”
