ATTENTION: HEALTH REPORTER

MEDIA STATEMENT FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE,
FRIDAY 22 JUNE 2007

“Two Canterbury Senior Doctor Stopwork Meetings Confirmed”

“The dates of the senior doctor stopwork meetings in Canterbury have been confirmed as part of the unprecedented national stopwork meetings over the impasse in the national collective agreement negotiations with district health boards,” 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 Canterbury DHB has been formally notified that there will be two two-hour stopwork meetings Thursday 26 July commencing at 10am in Ashburton and Thursday 2 August commencing at 1pm in Christchurch.”

“The impasse is over the failure of the DHBs to recognise the severity of New Zealand’s increasing difficulty in recruiting and retaining quality senior doctors. This difficulty is made worse by aggressive competition from Australia which has significantly increased terms and conditions of employment for senior doctors in response to their own shortages. Whereas senior doctors are thinking of tomorrow, the short-sighted DHBs are only thinking of today.”

“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.

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