The Cabinet of Ministers has approved the appointment of an official committee to draft a Service Minute creating a dedicated public service category for medical and dental specialists.
The new category is to be named the “Specialist Medical Officers and Specialist Dental Surgeons Service”. At present, specialists are absorbed into the broader health service structures rather than holding a service classification of their own — a long-standing grievance among consultant-grade staff, for whom salary scales, promotion paths and seniority rules are set through categories designed around general medical officers.
A Service Minute is the founding instrument for any public service category in Sri Lanka, fixing recruitment criteria, grades, promotion procedure and disciplinary authority. Drafting one is therefore the substantive step that determines what a new category actually delivers, and the newly appointed committee has been tasked with that work.
The decision follows the recommendations of an earlier committee appointed at the Cabinet meeting of 12 January 2026 to examine whether a distinct category for specialists was warranted. That committee completed what the Daily Mirror described as a comprehensive review and submitted its report; Tuesday’s approval takes its recommendations to the drafting stage.
Both clinical and administrative officers are to fall within the new service category.
The Daily Mirror did not report a deadline for the committee’s draft, the composition of the committee, or how many specialists would be covered. As of Tuesday evening, no other verified Sri Lankan newsroom had published its own report of the decision — and a reader comment on the Daily Mirror’s own page raised an immediate question the announcement leaves open: whether community medicine specialists, who are neither clinical nor administrative in the usual sense, fall inside the new category.
