Hawke’s bay health boss gets his foot stuck in his mouth

MEDIA STATEMENT FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE,
WEDNESDAY 21 JANUARY 2015

“Hawke’s bay health boss gets his foot stuck in his mouth; surgery recommended to remove it”

“Hawke’s Bay District Health Board Chair Kevin Atkinson has got his foot stuck in his mouth and may require surgery,” said Mr Ian Powell, Executive Director of the Association of Salaried Medical Specialists (ASMS), today.

In defending his Chief Executive Kevin Snee’s salary increase Mr Atkinson said that Dr Snee also did unpaid work and added that “You won’t get doctors doing that for nothing.”

“This is false, nonsense and a gratuitous insult to hospital specialists who work long hours making decisions on a daily basis that affect whether patients are harmed or not or who die or not. Most specialists work more hours than they are paid for which is unpaid work every day.”

“Furthermore overwhelmingly hospital specialists are involved in a wide range of professional and clinical activities, much of which is unpaid, in their professional colleges and associations as educators and setting clinical standards for doctors, in charities (such as respiratory physicians for the Asthma Foundation), and the charity hospitals.

“As the top health boss in Hawke’s Bay Mr Atkinson should be praising his medical specialists rather than behaving like an arsonist searching for a firelighter.”

Mr Atkinson was responding to media coverage of chief executive salary increases including his own, Kevin Snee. Unfortunately in doing so he has made other errors and unwittingly thrust his own chief executive into the limelight.

“He claims that an ASMS statement on chief executive salaries was ‘highly misleading’. But all we did was refer to a report on chief executive salary increases by the State Services Commission. It is not our report.

“Mr Atkinson claims that our statement was ‘simply the opening salvo in the imminent negotiations with the DHBs about senior doctors pay.’ If he had done his homework he would have realised that there are no ‘imminent’ negotiations due. Our national collective agreement does not expire until 30 June 2016.”

Powell added that Mr Atkinson had completely misunderstood the ASMS’s concern. It was not over chief executive salaries.

“Instead our concern is the hypocrisy of the huge discrepancy between the limit set by chief executives of a 0.7% annual salary increase on all other DHB staff and their own salary increases. Most chief executives received salary increases of between $10,000 and $30,000 (between 2% and nearly 6%) last year. If the chief executives policy for all other staff had been applied to themselves then their increases would have been around $3,000 to $5,000. What’s good for the gander is not good enough for the goose.

“Whether Kevin Snee’s salary increase was 2% as Mr Atkinson claims or 16% as the State Services Commission reported, it is irrelevant. This issue is that as a bare minimum it is, as with most other chief executives, at least three times more that the chief executives’ limit on all their staff.”

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