By Ruth Hill, RNZ News reporter
Striking senior New Zealand doctors have hit back at the Health Minister’s attack on their union for “forcing” patients to wait longer for surgery and appointments, due to their 24-hour industrial action.
Respiratory and sleep physician Dr Andrew Davies, who was on the picketline outside Wellington Regional Hospital, said for him and his colleagues, it was “not about the money” — it was about the inability to recruit.
“We’ve got vacant jobs that we’re not allowed to advertise,” he said. “It’s lies that they’re not getting rid of frontline staff.
“The job is technically there on paper, but if you’re not going to advertise for the job, you’re not going to fill it.
“In our department, we’ve waited months and months and months to fill some jobs, and you don’t just get a doctor next week. It takes six months for them to come.”
Dr Davies said no-one wanted to strike and have their patients miss out on care, but thousands of patients were already missing out on care every day, due to staff shortages.
“Every week, we’ve got empty clinics,” he said. “There is space in the clinics that’s not being used, because there’s not a doctor in the chair there.
“While, today, that’s 20 percent of the work of the week gone, because we’re on strike, in some departments, it’s 20 percent every week.
“Every day of the week, there’s a 20 percent deficit in the number of patients people are seeing.”
5500 doctors on strike
Nationwide, about 5500 members of the Association of Salaried Medical Specialists are on strike until 11:59pm today, causing the cancellation of about 4300 planned procedures and specialist appointments.
In a social media post, Health Minister Simeon Brown blamed the union for the disruption, saying an updated offer last week — including a $25,000 bonus for those moving to “hard-to-staff regions” — was rejected by the union, before members even saw it.
Union executive director Sarah Dalton said she would be very happy to facilitate a meeting between doctors and the minister — or he could accept the invitation to attend its national conference.
“They would love to feel like someone up there was listening,” she said. “They don’t at the moment.
“We need to move away from rhetoric, and actually have some time and space for meaningful discussion.
“That’s one of the reasons we’re on strike today. After eight months of negotiating, there was nothing on the table from the employer.
“It was only after we called for strike action that anything changed, so let’s do better.”
Critical workforce shortages were undermining patient care and the current pay offer, which amounted to an increase of less than one percent a year for most doctors, would do nothing to fix that, Dalton said.
“How do you tackle vacancies? You put more time and effort in good terms and conditions for your permanent workforce, and you stop spending spending $380 million a year on locums and temps.
“We shouldn’t have that heavy reliance on those people, so we’ve got to change it.”
NZ training doctors for Australia
After many years of study subsidised by the New Zealand taxpayer, Maeve Hume-Nixon recently qualified as a public health specialist, but may yet end up going overseas.
“I actually thought last year that I would have to go to Australia, where I would be paid another $100,000 minimum, because there were no jobs for me here, basically.
“In the end, I managed to get an emergency extension to my contract and this has continued, but I don’t have security and it’s a pretty frustrating position to be in.”
Neurologist Dr Maas Mollenhauer said he was not able to access the tests he needed to provide care for his patients.
“I’ve seen patients that I have sent for urgent imaging, but they didn’t receive it, and then I got an email from one of my colleagues who was on call, telling me that patient had rocked up to the Emergency Department and, basically, the front half of their skull was full of brain tumour.”
Cancer patients waiting too long
Medical oncologist Dr Sharon Pattison said the health system had reached the point where it was so starved of people and resources, it had become “inefficient”.
“Everyone is waiting for everything, so everything takes longer, and we are waiting until people get seriously ill, before we do anything about it.”
The government’s “faster cancer treatment time” target — 90 percent of patients receiving cancer management within 31 days of the decision to treat — would not give the true picture of what was happening for patients, she said.
“For instance, if I have someone with a potential diagnosis of cancer, there are so many points at which they are waiting — waiting for scan, waiting for a biopsy, waiting for a radiologist to report the scan to show us where to get the biopsy.
“That radiologist may be overseas, so if I want to talk to that specialist I can’t do that. Then the wait for a pathologist to report on the biopsy can now take up to 6-8 weeks.
“We know that, for some people with cancer, if you wait for that long before we can even make your treatment plan, we’re going to make your outcomes worse.
“The whole system is at the point where we are making people more unwell, because we can’t do what we should be doing for them in the framework that we need to.”
This article is republished under a community partnership agreement with RNZ.