Doctors Need Lateral Thinking

IT IS easy to see why, when Health Minister David Cunliffe was asked in Parliament 10 days ago what he would say to those affected by the junior doctors’ strike, he uttered only two words: “Deborah Powell.” The secretary of the trainee doctors’ trade union, the Resident Doctors’ Assocation, has a polarising style.

She is unpopular in the Beehive and with those who employ her members, district health boards.

Last week, many RDA members walked off the wards for two days in the first of what might be rolling strikes in support of more pay, forcing public hospitals to defer the elective surgery and outpatient appointments of more than 8000 people. They will strike again next month.

Boards say they cannot afford what the young doctors are seeking and that it would be unfair to give them a higher percentage pay rise than that given to nurses and senior doctors. The Government — bar denouncing Dr Powell — is saying little, though intervened to help settle the senior doctors’ and nurses’ pay talks.

Wanganui board member and mayor Michael Laws says board negotiators’ hard-ball stance is “self-defeating” but points out they have only as much money as the Government gives them.

He is right, of course, but the minister’s adamance that he will not interfere says much about his and his officials’ frustration with Dr Powell’s tactics.

This ridiculous pantomime cannot continue. One word — “patient” – - has been rarely heard in this over-heated row. Thousands of ordinary Kiwis are having their engagement with the public health system disrupted all because neither side wants to be seen as the one to yield.

Dr Powell and her troops need to get their heads around a few things. First, most people do not believe their protestations that, because so many young medics are tempted overseas, the union action is aimed at preserving the public health system. We feel a Tui billboard coming on.

Second, New Zealand might never be able to afford to pay what wealthier countries can pay their trainee doctors. And comparisons with locums’ pay are naive.

Third, they might ponder the reality that being absent from work makes employers inventive. Young doctors surely don’t want to make themselves dispensable — private hospitals, after all, manage quite well without them.

But boards and the Health Ministry, too, must think harder and be more imaginative about the money they do have to play with. The young doctors have a legitimate case — if they can get bigger bucks across the Tasman, a way must be found to encourage them to stay and repay to taxpayers some of the 70 per cent of their training costs that the state has invested in making them doctors.

Perhaps, for example, boards could offer to write off all or part of the baby doctors’ loans if they were to give, say, three or five years to the public health system here. If, as Dr Powell professes, this impasse is not really about higher pay, her members will surely be interested in rewards of other kinds. And if they are not, Mr Cunliffe might well have to order boards to dump administrative staff to free up dollars to pay for those without whom hospitals cannot function.

(c) 2008 Dominion Post. Provided by ProQuest Information and Learning. All rights Reserved.