Doctors on Strike

With one physician for every 612 people, Austria is one of the most carefully doctored countries in the world. But last week Vienna's 24 major hospitals (24,000 beds, usually full) turned away patients with such nonurgent complaints as gallstones and diseased tonsils. Reason: the 1,500 doctors who work full time for the hospitals were out on strike.

It was the biggest doctors' strike since the war to hit Austria's socialized medicine, which is 39 years old and covers 75% of the population. As before, the doctors wanted more money, and few healthy Viennese disputed their demands. The hospital physicians, who average only $80 a month,* have dickered for eight months for raises that would give them $6.40 more. When officials offered only $3.20, they walked out. To tend such urgent cases as childbirth, the strikers left 300 doctors on duty round the clock, promised full care in any emergency. Veterinarians promptly mounted a sympathy strike that left Vienna's vast poodle population unpampered.

By week's end, only doctors at six Catholic and three Protestant hospitals had won their demands. That still left 90% of the doctors on strike--and they won support from an unexpected source. At one hospital, Lainze Krankenhaus, in sympathy with their doctors, bed patients went on a hunger strike.

*Compared to a U.S. pay ranging from $141 to $177 a month for interns, and from $50 (at Baltimore's Johns Hopkins) to $500 a month for resident physicians.

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