By Rosaleen MacBrayne
WHAKATANE - Stressed Whakatane Hospital specialists say they cannot go on coping with their unrelenting workload.
Seeking more resources and parity with their Tauranga colleagues, they are holding a two-hour stop work meeting today.
Whakatane and Tauranga Hospitals were amalgamated early this year under Pacific Health management.
But on a much
lower pay scale and without the registrar backup their Tauranga counterparts enjoy, the 20 Whakatane doctors feel they are being unfairly discriminated against.
"We are all absolutely exhausted, and many are on the verge of falling over," says the 150-bed hospital's sole orthopaedic surgeon, Kingsley Foote.
Mr Foote chairs the local branch of the Association of Salaried Medical Specialists.
In Whakatane for five years, he is on call most nights for emergencies.
"To walk my fox terrier on the beach for an hour on Sunday, with my bleeper in my pocket, is the closest I get to a rest."
Desmond Collins, a general surgeon and head of the surgical department, believes Whakatane - where he has worked for 14 years - is busier than similar-sized hospitals such as Thames and Blenheim.
It covers a big geographical area with a large Maori population and low health and socio-economic status.
"We are doing the work; we would like to be treated as equals," he says quietly. "We can't understand how one company can treat two hospitals so differently."
The men, one from South Africa and the other from Sri Lanka, say Whakatane, although "a super little hospital," faces a serious specialist recruitment and retention problem.
New Zealand-trained doctors do not want to work there because the conditions are too onerous, and there is a turnover of locums every few months.
This, they believe, is unfair to the public, which deserves the same stable, high-quality health services as Tauranga or anywhere else.
Whakatane Hospital's human resource manager, Stan Austen, said Pacific Health negotiators would meet the doctors again in late September to discuss their contract.
