Money for nothing, and doctors for free?

A story about Quebec doctors asking to be paid for volunteering in Haiti was posted on the CBC news website on Wednesday, January 27, 2010.

It turns out that Quebec’s Health minister, Yves Bolduc has received a request from a group of orthopedic specialists. The specialists claim they are loosing money at home while they work abroad and think they should be compensated. The magic number is $704 a day, this is a “base fee” that they make in Quebec and so far only the orthopedic doctors have requested this kind of reimbursement.

The request is being considered by the Quebec government who are mindful of the implication of agreeing to the doctor’s demands. “There are many consequences to the decision, because you have many people who work in Haiti and they are volunteers and they are not paid,” says minister Bolduc. If the government does not agree to pay, the doctors will remain in Haiti, but not as long as they would have if they’d been compensated.

Dr. Gaétan Barrette, head of the federation of medical specialists in Quebec, contends that the request is fitting for the situation. Dr. Barrette compares the services the doctors provide to the work done by firefighters and police who, coincidentally, get paid for their services.

With the disaster in Haiti starting to fade in the collective consciousness of the media, and as a result society at large, stories like this really need to be in the forefront. As noble as it is to volunteer or to donate there are always people with ulterior motives to their philanthropy, this may be one of those cases. It may be the first of many reports of such requests and that is something to look out for.

Medical professionals are often revered in our society, they go to special schools, they have special titles, and they have the power over life and death. Power and prestige are tricky things because they can make a person great or they can make them monsters. This recent request for compensation seems to be a case of doctors taking advantage of their stature.

The Canadian Oxford Dictionary defines volunteer in a variety ways, but the two closest to fitting the bill here are:

1. A person who voluntarily takes part in an enterprise or offers to undertake a task.

3. A person who works for an organization voluntarily and without pay

So the question is which definition did the doctors have in mind when they volunteered their services? Is the sentiment of the doctor’s action tainted if they were voluntarily taking part in the aid effort with no intention of forgoing some form of pay? So many ethical and moral questions are raised by this story and answering them is made more difficult by the scope of the Haitian disaster.

On the one hand, these doctors are uprooting themselves from their lives and going into harms way, presumably, to help those in need. The cynical view is that they are taking a disaster vacation and will return to their practices with some great photos of smiling Haitian children and a large feather in their caps.

There must be a middle ground to this situation, some way to make compensating volunteers seem less petty, a tax break or something less vulgar than cash money. Perhaps these doctors deserve $704 a day for their work. They make nearly $5000 a week on these fees alone in Canada and it may be too much to ask them to forgo that income. They provide an essential service that is desperately needed in Haiti and that is hard to put a price on.