Junior doctors to strike for first time in five years
At 7am on May 7, Dr James Anderson will have worked through the night, but will walk out the doors of Wellington Regional Hospital and join a picket line with a sign reading: Every doctor counts.
Anderson, speaking as president of the New Zealand Resident Doctors Association (NZRDA) says striking was never the plan for resident medical officers (RMOs), also known as junior doctors.
“This is a really unfortunate endpoint and not what we wanted to do. But we won’t leave any RMOs behind.”
But with 500 RMOs already missing from the workforce, the strike was about patients, he said. “If we want a public health system that's going to keep on delivering operations, we need to sort this out.”
The union issued the strike notice on Monday, for a 25 hour-long strike on May 7, indicating the first strike in five years. Secretary Dr Deborah Powell said Health New Zealand had proposed options that would result in pay cuts or a pay freeze for nearly 600 registrars, including 300 GP trainees in 2025.
Health NZ’s chief people officer Andrew Slater said in initial negotiations, the employer “guaranteed that no RMO will receive a pay cut”.
RMOs were “vital and valued” and Health NZ had “already indicated we are prepared to make a very significant investment in settling the NZRDA collective agreement”.
But Anderson said it appeared the employer was trying to pay for the offer by taking from one resident doctor and giving it to another.
“And those pay cuts are affecting the people we can least afford to lose ... like psychiatry, public health, radiation oncology, and our future GP workforce.”
Anderson said among the clauses Health NZ rejected at bargaining was a request to enable doctors to take their leave, despite a directive from the agency to unions that doctors should be taking leave. “It just feels out of touch,” Anderson said.
Another NZRDA member, Dr Nina Su, said strike action was always to protect patients, because poor staffing was affecting doctors’ ability to make decisions.
“We’re not able to function as well as we would like.”
But it was also to protect the next generation of doctors. “Medical students are already looking at exit strategies when they see how stressed we are,” Su said.
She knew of colleagues who had recently left medicine altogether due to stress, or had quit and come back as a casual doctor where they can choose their own hours and earn more.
“The only way to improve employment is to make being a full time employed doctor more attractive than working in private, working in Australia or leaving medicine altogether,” Su, a paediatric and emergency doctor in Auckland, said.
Health NZ’s Andrew Slater believed bargaining was the most effective way to resolve things and avoid disruption to patients and the wider health system.
Health NZ could not provide information on which doctors will be asked to provide life and limb preserving care during the strike, saying that would be determined as part of the contingency planning.
More discussions are scheduled between Health NZ and the union next week.
The NZRDA has about 2500 members, while the Specialty Trainees of New Zealand (STONZ) union represents about 2100 resident doctors.