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Media Statements

29 July 2007

New Zealand public hospitals threatened

New Zealand has lost at least 80 specialists to jobs in Australia in the last eighteen months. What was a trickle is now assuming the proportions of a flood which threatens the viability of New Zealand’s public hospitals.

The Association of Salaried Medical Specialists has undertaken a survey of its members in the 21 District Health Boards of specialists who have left or have resigned and about to leave New Zealand for Australia.

Executive Director Ian Powell says if the DHBs don’t see this as an issue, people using the country’s hospitals surely will.

“Australia has its own serious specialist shortages and has experienced medical tragedies as a result.  Consequently Australia is aggressively and successfully trying to recruit specialists from New Zealand. 

“Our specialists are highly sought after in Australia because of the similarity of our training and registration systems.  They are offering far superior salaries and conditions.  The cross Tasman traffic of specialists is one way.  Over 80 of our specialists have gone their way.  We struggle to think of any specialists recruited from Australia in the same period of time,” Ian Powell says.

“We have been telling the DHBs that the salaries and conditions for senior doctors working in our hospitals are making recruitment and retention of specialists very difficult.

“When you think of 80 senior doctors who provide essential specialist services leaving, the depth of the problem is apparent.

“If they were all from the same part of the country it would completely wipe out public hospitals the size of Whangarei, Tauranga, Hawkes Bay, Palmerston North and Nelson.  Smaller hospitals such as New Plymouth, Gisborne and Southland would be blitzed,” he says.

“Even being spread out through the country still has the effect of de-stabilising and threatening services.  Paediatric oncology in Wellington is a recent unfortunate example.

“This explains why our stopwork meetings are adopting overwhelmingly resolutions from the floor describing the situation as a crisis.”

Ian Powell says the unprecedented stopwork meetings that began this week have emphasised the concerns felt by senior doctors. The nationwide meetings have been called to discuss action after fruitless negotiations for a year.

He says the negotiations have been “very difficult” and the stopworks are needed to allow members to discuss what they want to do next.  So far all eight meetings have overwhelmingly supported holding a postal ballot of members on whether lawful industrial action should be taken and rejected the DHBs offer.

“It is clear that DHBs have underestimated the strength of feeling of senior doctors who are determined to try to preserve the quality of hospital services for their patients.”

Ian Powell says senior doctors are seeing Australia as an increasingly attractive place.  Its attraction includes the fact that in today’s world they can regularly visit New Zealand to see family and friends.  More than other countries, the geographic closeness of the two countries is a further threat because it is more likely that they will stay permanently in Australia.

“An Australian hospital recently offered one of our members twice as much as he currently makes in New Zealand plus housing, a car and a cellphone. In addition he was offered every fourth week off on top of annual leave, flights home to New Zealand and funding for continuing medical education.

“The threat is even worse with younger doctors.  New Zealand registrars looking for specialist jobs are also going to Australia for the same reasons.  This threat is drying up our sources of recruitment both in New Zealand and overseas.

“This threat risks a serious financial blow-out in our public hospitals.  District Health Boards are still required to provide services and the alternative to cover shortages is to employ temporary doctors (locums) on much higher salaries and conditions.  The total cost of employing temporary specialists is around three times greater than the cost of a permanently employed specialist.  If the situation continues to deteriorate there is a serious risk that this will become fiscally unaffordable,” he says.

Click here to view actual numbers of specialists lost to Australia

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