KEY POINTS:
Health practitioners have done well out of the present Government. Much of its increased health funding has gone not into hospital operations but professional salaries, often following some flexing of collective muscle. Junior doctors and radiation therapists have used strikes to soften up state employers over the past
year or so. Now it is the turn of the senior doctors.
Members of their 2800-strong union, the Association of Salaried Medical Specialists, are holding unprecedented stopwork meetings at public hospitals throughout the country. Another will be held today. The stoppages seem certain to be followed by a postal ballot on more sustained action.
Senior doctors, says their association, are exasperated at an impasse with district health boards over their claim for increases in salaries and allowances of up to 14 per cent over two years. These would take their average annual earnings to about $190,000. The deadlock has endured for a year, during which the boards have offered what they say is a rise of 5 per cent a year over four years, including a $5000 lump-sum payment.
The specialists have previously been averse to industrial action, lambasting junior doctors for threatening patient care and medical ethics during their strike last year. But their association is now presenting a case top heavy with the rhetoric customarily used by seasoned unions.
The association talks about a crisis facing public healthcare. If its claims are not met, it foresees an accelerated flight to Australia, where senior doctors can earn between A$27,000 and A$50,000 more than they get here. In time, the association says, there will not be enough specialists to provide the public health system this country needs.
Unfortunately for the doctors' pay claim, records do not support them. Dr Nigel Murray, the lead negotiator for the district health boards, says there has been no sudden surge of doctors crossing the Tasman. Indeed, according to 2005 Medical Council statistics, there has been no change in the drift to Australia over the past decade. Further, the number of specialist doctors has actually increased by 350 in the past three years.
The association can only counter that 80 senior doctors have gone to Australia in the past 18 months. This has probably been spurred by the far greater sums of money suddenly on offer in a country that is recruiting vigorously worldwide to remedy a shortage of doctors. Many New Zealanders, presumably, are acting as locums, a practice vilified by the association when used as a palliative here.
New Zealand needs to pay competitive rates to attract and keep sufficient senior medical staff in its hospitals but the health boards will be as aware of that need as the staff, and it is the boards, not the staff, who stand to answer if services suffer. The boards must work within budgets that are more generous than ever. They must not be stampeded into pay increases by those who stand to gain.
Our hospitals are already well served by doctors recruited from other countries. The medical profession is one of the most internationally mobile these days. We attract many, we lose many. If Australia has lately attracted more than usual, the answer is not to enter a wage bargaining war we could probably not win against a country so similar. We can both attract staff, particularly from developing countries, on the strength of our lifestyle.
If the doctors' demands were accepted in full, many of them would still head for Australia. Their stated concerns are transparently self-serving and their industrial tactics, unprecedented from senior doctors, do them no credit.