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Junior doctors say they hope to resolve their pay dispute with district health boards (DHBs) before strike action is set to take place in two weeks.
Yesterday their union, the New Zealand Resident Doctors Association (NZRDA), announced its members had voted to take strike action, with the first
industrial action to start nationwide on April 22.
DHBs have started planning for the strike, which would reduce hospitals to emergency services and delay non-urgent surgery and elective treatments for several days.
NZRDA general secretary Dr Deborah Powell said while DHBs had said that they were prepared to meet and talk at any time, that had not been the case for the past month.
"We did request to meet and negotiate on the 29th and 30th of March, and again on the 1st and 2nd of April but received no response from the DHBs," she said.
"We have done our best to arrange times to meet but we appear to be on the low end of the priority scale for them.
"The only way to get on the priority scale with the DHBs seems to be to take strike action," Dr Powell said.
She said that so far the DHBs' failure to recognize the value of their staff had seen cleaners, food service workers, lab technicians and most recently, senior doctors go on strike or threaten to go on strike to receive recognition.
The doctors are claiming three base pay increases of 10 per cent a year plus increases in other allowances and rates that DHBs have said pushed the costs to 40 per cent in total or more than 13 per cent per year.
David Meates, chief executive of the Waikato District Health Board and the DHBs' spokesman on the dispute, said the DHBs were keen to avoid disruption in the hospitals.
But he said the union's statement was "the usual industrial relations rhetoric, full of half truths and selectively misleading information".
"We are keen to avoid any disruption to hospital services but it's hard to know what we can talk about when they have a 40 per cent pay claim, which is totally unrealistic and equally unaffordable," Mr Meates said.
Dr Powell said junior doctors would provide essential life preserving services to patients during the strike action.
Earlier today Health Minister David Cunliffe did not rule out intervening over the strike.
Last month Mr Cunliffe intervened in a deadlock between DHBs and senior doctors which resulted in a breakthrough. Reporters asked if he might do that again.
"I wouldn't rule that out at some point," he said.
"But I don't believe that the normal discussion process has yet been exhausted and if you think about another discussion that happened recently that had been going 21 months and this has only been going four."
Junior doctors or resident medical officers are registered medical practitioners, and range in experience from first year qualified doctors to those with more than 12 years experience.
They work almost exclusively in the public sector, and are employed by all 21 DHBs.
- NZPA