Advice For Prospective Applicants

• For general advice about job descriptions including duties, hours of work and the allocation of responsibilities within a particular service, we recommend you contact the clinical director or head of department or equivalent position.
• New Zealand is a small country and many hospital departments are also quite small. For particular advice about the working environment and relationships within the department we recommend you contact a knowledgeable and friendly colleague within the service or hospital. The ASMS national office may also be able to advise you about the working environment of a particular department and hospital.
• For advice on terms and conditions of employment in a particular workplace and for tactical advice during your preliminary discussions and subsequent negotiations we recommend you contact a member of the industrial staff at the ASMS national office.
• Under New Zealand's employment law, you must be offered employment under any collective agreement the ASMS may have negotiated with your prospective employer. Your prospective employer must also tell you how to contact the ASMS for advice.
• The law also allows you to negotiate additional terms and conditions of employment, provided they are not inconsistent with any current collective agreement the ASMS has negotiated with the employer.
• The ASMS represents about 90% of all senior medical and dental officers employed in New Zealand's public hospitals. We have good professional working relationships with all the employers we deal with. There is no reason for you to be cautious about seeking our advice and advising your prospective employer that you have done so.

Advice For Successful Applicants

If you are offered employment as a senior medical or dental officer in a New Zealand hospital, there are several matters you should consider:

• By law, the employing authority must offer you employment under any current collective agreement the ASMS has negotiated with the particular hospital or other employer. The law also allows you to negotiate additional terms and conditions provided they are not inconsistent with those in the collective agreement.
• The ASMS collective agreements contain all the basic matters you are likely to want in an employment contract. These include provisions on: sick leave, annual leave, public holidays, continuing medical education leave and expenses, reimbursement of professional fees, right to private practice, quality assurance activities and recognition of your wider professional and ethical responsibilities etc.

The most important areas left for you to negotiate are: starting salary, job size and hours of work, after-hours' on-call duties, an employer contribution to a superannuation or pension plan (where our collective agreement contains no such provision) and relocation costs for you and your family. Each of these matters should be thought about carefully. We are aware of local practice and precedents and are willing to share that information with you.

We recommend you contact a member of the ASMS industrial staff for advice before you begin your negotiations. The ASMS offers this service free of charge, but in the expectation that should you be appointed to the position you will join the Association.

You may find the comments below helpful

Salary
All appointments, whether full-time or part-time, whether locum or permanent are entitled to a base salary drawn from the salary scale the ASMS has negotiated with the particular employer.

The ASMS salary scales are for base salary i.e. for a nominal full-time appointment (1.0 FTE) of 40 hours a week, Monday to Friday (pro rated for part-timers). In determining your starting salary the employer should have regard to such matters as your date of qualifying and your skills and experience. Normally your salary should be fair having regard to others paid in the department.

For details of Public Hospitals salary rates and other conditions of employment refer to the national DHB Collective Agreement and the Annual Salary Survey Results.

Hours of Work
Our national DHB agreement contains "job-sizing" provisions (Clause 12) under which there should be agreement as to the hours reasonably required to discharge all your duties, including time spent responding to call and sufficient non clinical time. The Association is promoting what we call the 70:30 split. This means that 70% of your time should be for clinical activities and 30% reserved for non-clinical activities. On-call duties will be additional. Your job size is an agreed average of your weekly hours spread over the term of the roster. In theory, over time each person on the roster will spend the same time responding to call and will therefore be paid the same number of hours for their on-call work.

The position you have been offered may be new or you may be introducing a new service and you may not know what a realistic or fair job size would be. In this case it is reasonable to reserve your position on job-size until you have been in the post for several months and assessed the workload. This will generally be acceptable to management.

Payment For Rostered On-Call
Our national DHB collective agreement contains provision for payment of an "availability allowance" (Clause 14) which is a retainer for being on the roster. This allowance is normally a percentage of the full-time base salary and is compensation for simply being available periodically. The percentage will vary from roster to roster according to the nature and frequency of the call, the required response time and the availability of junior staff.

Relocation Expenses
A small number of the ASMS agreements contain provisions requiring the employer to pay the actual and reasonable costs of relocating you and your family and your household belongings to New Zealand. All employers will make a contribution to these costs. The ASMS position is that the new employer should pay in full all the relocation costs for full-time appointments. Most employers accept this position, but some do not. This is a matter on which we recommend you seek our advice and you should raise it early in your negotiations.

Relocation costs may also include the costs of a brief stopover during a long journey, particularly if you are travelling with young children. It will also generally include meeting the cost of motel or serviced apartment accommodation for from three to eight weeks on arrival.
You could not normally expect reimbursement of the cost of transporting motor vehicles, boats or animals.

Special Conditions
If you bring special or much sought after skills to the post, your bargaining position may be stronger. We have assisted some people negotiate personal allowances; additional leave; extra education leave and expenses (including annual trips to Europe or North America); additional sessions and special equipment for research; special items of new equipment for their department and strengthened intellectual property rights.

If you believe you are in this position we recommend you discuss your situation with us or your colleagues in the Department to assess your "worth and bargaining strength".

Don't Rely on Managers for Contract Advice
From time to time members report to us the advice that was given to them by their manager on the application or interpretation of their employment contract.

Sometimes the manager's advice is correct and helpful but, on other occasions it may be quite wrong. We advise members not to rely on a manager's advice about their rights. The Association offers members independent and professional legal advice on their employment agreements and all aspects of their employment in general.