Whanganui senior doctor stopwork meeting CONFIRMED

Media Statement For Immediate Release,
friday 29 june 2007

“Whanganui senior doctor stopwork meeting CONFIRMED”

“The date of the senior doctor stopwork meeting in the Whanganui District Health Board has been confirmed as part of the unprecedented national stopwork meetings over the impasse in the national collective agreement negotiations with the 21 DHBs,”said Mr Ian Powell, Executive Director of the Association of Salaried Medical Specialists, today. This is not strike action and emergency cover will continue to be provided.

“The Whanganui DHB has been formally notified that there will be a two-hour stopwork meeting on Wednesday 8 August commencing at 9am.”

“The impasse in negotiations is caused by the failure of the DHBs to recognise the severity of New Zealand’s increasing difficulty in recruiting and retaining quality senior doctors. Whanganui is vulnerable to losing its senior doctors to aggressive recruitment campaigns from Australia seeking to attract them across the Tasman by offering significantly superior terms and conditions of employment. Whanganui has already experienced to its cost what can go wrong when you have senior doctor shortages.”

“The DHB has deliberately been given much more notice than the legal two week requirement in order that DHBs will not schedule operations and clinics during these periods of time so that patient inconvenience is minimised and as much as possible no patient faces the cancellation of scheduled appointments or procedures,”concluded Mr Powell.

Ian Powell

EXECUTIVE DIRECTOR

ENDS

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