News
Media Statements
9 August 2007
Government must take responsibility for resolving crisis – doctors
Whakatane senior doctors are urging the Government to take responsibility for resolving the workforce crisis facing public hospitals.
Twenty-four senior doctors met in Whakatane today and agreed unanimously that the Government needs to actively intervene to resolve the medical workforce crisis in
Association of Salaried Medical Specialists executive director Ian Powell says the message was very clear with those attending showing serious concern over the problem of retaining and recruiting senior doctors.
“The meeting felt strongly that the answer to the problem lies with the Government. The doctors are urging the Government to take responsibility for resolving the crisis.”
The Whakatane meeting is the second to last stopwork meeting in a series of 26 which have been held around the country over the past four weeks. The unprecedented move by senior doctors comes in the wake of an impasse being reached in negotiations with District Health Boards for a national collective agreement.
Ian Powell says there was also unanimous support to hold a postal vote of members to decide if lawful industrial action should be taken. All of the other meetings have also voted in favour of this.
“The senior doctors working in this region want action now. Being a small region they are feeling the pinch of this workforce crisis, with a high dependence on locums particularly in the area of general medicine and emergencies. A reliance on temporary doctors comes at a much higher cost than permanent staff – in fact around three times the cost.”
He says the doctors also expressed serious concern over the impact the workplace crisis is having on the right of patients to receive the care and treatment they deserve.
Specialists at the Whakatane meeting voted unanimously to refuse the DHBs’ current offer and to condemn DHBs for their failure to genuinely negotiate, he says. The meeting also expressed concern over the DHBs’ advocate’s “serious misrepresentation” of senior doctor recruitment and retention and also doctors’ remuneration.
The final meeting is also scheduled for today (Thursday August 9) involving senior doctors from Rotorua.
