The Government Medical Officers’ Association has appointed an expert committee to study the 2027 Budget and will decide on 19 November what action, if any, it takes in response.
The decision was taken at a special emergency executive committee meeting held on Friday to discuss the budget President Anura Kumara Dissanayake presented to Parliament on Thursday, according to a media statement from the association reported by Hiru News.
What the committee will do
The committee is to carry out what the GMOA describes as a specific study of the contradictions between the budget speech and its associated documents on one hand, and the set of budget proposals the GMOA itself submitted on 31 July, on the other.
It is chaired by Specialist Dr. Sanjeewa Thennakoon, and the association has decided to take its report on Tuesday, 17 November.
Branch unions consulted
The GMOA has also circulated all the budget speech documents and related material to its branch unions, instructing them to submit their own views and proposals to the committee by the 17th.
An emergency central working committee meeting has been called for 19 November to review both the expert committee’s report and the branch unions’ proposals, and to decide on the union’s next steps.
The stated objective
The association said the 19 November meeting would decide what is needed to implement a sustainable programme for the advancement of the health sector while encouraging specialists and doctors to remain in the country.
That framing places retention of medical staff at the centre of the union’s response — the same concern that has run through professional reaction to this budget. On Friday morning the president of a separate body, the Medical Professionals’ Alliance for Medical and Civil Rights, warned that the budget could accelerate the departure of doctors, and public service engineers held a symbolic strike saying it offered them no relief.
The GMOA has been pressing the government on pay and tax for months. It sought assessment of tax on gross rather than net income in early November and held islandwide hospital protests at the start of the month.
Not reported
The statement does not say which budget proposals the GMOA submitted in July, nor which contradictions it believes the speech contains — the study is being commissioned to establish that. It names no figure for pay, allowances or health allocations, does not say how many doctors attended Friday’s meeting, and gives no indication of what action is being contemplated. No strike or work-to-rule is mentioned. There is no government or Health Ministry response.
Sourcing
A single-source report. A sweep of the Daily Mirror breaking and business rails, the NewsFirst homepage payload and the EconomyNext rail on Friday evening found no other verified newsroom carrying the GMOA statement, which was filed at about 8.08pm Colombo time. The quotations and figures above are translated from the Sinhala-language Hiru filing. This article will be updated if other newsrooms carry it.