MEDIA STATEMENT FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE,
SUNDAY 10 JUNE 2007

“Senior Doctors Announce Unprecedented National Stopwork Meetings”

“Senior doctors will be commencing a full round of unprecedented national stopwork meetings on 17 July which are expected to continue over the following 3-4 weeks,” said Mr Ian Powell, Executive Director of the Association of Salaried Medical Specialists, today. The first meetings will be held at Waitemata on 17 July followed by Tairawhiti (18 July), Northland (19 July) and Tauranga (20 July). Announcements of further meetings will be made later. The meetings will be for two hours during which emergency cover will continue to be provided. They are not strike action.

“Never before have senior doctors undertaken national stopwork meetings. They are in response to the continuing impasse in our national collective agreement negotiations which started over a year ago. To date there have been 21 days of negotiation including 7 with a mediator. While we remain committed to mediation, we can’t allow Nero-like health bosses to continue to fiddle while Rome burns.”

“While New Zealand struggles to recruit and retain quality senior doctors, district health boards have responded with an adversarial industrial relations strategy which is doing enormous damage to New Zealand.”

“Australia has significantly increased terms and conditions of employment for senior doctors in response to their own shortages. With far superior remuneration and other conditions, Australia is now aggressively competing against New Zealand. As a small country we are seriously threatened.”

“The purpose of the stopwork meetings is to discuss with senior doctors at their workplace the impasse and what further action should be taken to overcome it.”

“Senior doctors are being forced into stopwork meetings by the irresponsible approach of health bosses to our negotiations. We have deliberately given much more notice of the meetings than is legally required in order to minimise inconvenience for patients and to try and make sure that no patient faces the cancellation of scheduled appointments or procedures,” concluded Mr Powell.

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