Category: Association of Salaried Medical Specialists

Source: Association of Salaried Medical Specialists – Press Release/Statement:

Headline: Red flags over return to work health rules

The Association of Salaried Medical Specialists Toi Mata Hauora is concerned that changing self-isolation rules and allowing Covid positive staff to return to work in hospitals, could encourage already dangerous levels of presenteeism and burnout among senior doctors.

Presenteeism is defined as turning up to work when too unwell, fatigued or stressed to be productive.
ASMS research has shown that 80% of senior doctors routinely work through illness and one in two experience burnout.
ASMS Executive Director Sarah Dalton says both presenteeism and burnout have long been exacerbated by entrenched staffing shortages.
“Our members have a keen sense of duty. They don’t like to let their colleagues down or see patients miss out on treatment.”
“While the Ministry of Health has issued specific criteria and has emphasised that staff must agree to return to work and should not feel pressured, the reality might be quite different.”
The rules also run contrary to more general advice on recovering from Covid.
“From all the evidence, anyone who has had Covid should have time to properly rest and recover. We acknowledge that special circumstances call for special measures in a pandemic, but these rules send the wrong message about looking after the health and wellbeing of our health workers,” Sarah Dalton says.
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Source: Association of Salaried Medical Specialists – Press Release/Statement:

Headline: DHBs drop the ball on closing the gender pay gap

The Association of Salaried Medical Specialists Toi Mata Hauora says International Women’s Day should make DHBs sit up and think about their failure to address the gender pay gap in the specialist workforce and fixing it must become a priority for Health NZ.

ASMS commissioned research shows that female specialists in our public hospitals are paid 12.5% less than their male colleagues. The gap widens for female specialists with children.
“On International Women’s Day, we want to celebrate the achievements and work of our senior women doctors and dentists, but also reflect on the continuing injustice of the gender pay gap,” says ASMS Executive Director Sarah Dalton.
“We continue to pick up cases where equally qualified women are placed on a lower salary step than their male colleagues. This creates career-long disadvantage.”
The Equal Pay Act has been in place since 1972 and DHBs have a legal obligation to ensure equal pay.
“DHBs have dropped the ball around meeting this obligation and have cited privacy rules as an excuse not to take action.”
“It should not be up to individual doctors to find out if their pay and conditions are unequal and remedy the problem. It is not their responsibility.
“It is frustrating that in 2022 this remains an issue which DHBs continue to ignore, along with their inflexible approach to part-time work, which disproportionately affects women,” Sarah Dalton says.
On July 1, Health NZ will take over as the employer of the public health workforce and the interim body has repeatedly said that workforce will be a priority.
Sarah Dalton says a key plank must be gender pay equality, pay transparency and access to flexible work.
ASMS welcomes MP Camilla Belich’s proposed members’ bill which would seek to amend the Employment Relations Act 2000 to allow employees to disclose their remuneration which would further change the legislative context against gender-based pay discrimination.
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Source: Association of Salaried Medical Specialists – Press Release/Statement:

Headline: ‘Year of Pain’ – please explain!

The Association of Salaried Medical Specialists Toi Mata Hauora wants the Government and District Health Board Chief Executives to publicly explain why senior doctors must experience a ‘year of pain’ before any pay increase will be considered.
Last year DHBs rejected a cost of living pay claim (1.5% at the time) from senior hospital doctors and dentists and offered zero percent. The DHBs commented that doctors and dentists needed to have a ‘year of pain’.
ASMS Executive Director Sarah Dalton says the comment is insulting, particularly in the Covid environment and against a backdrop in which 50% of senior doctors report burnout.
“Our members are being asked to go the extra mile and haven’t hesitated despite battling entrenched staff shortages, burgeoning patient waiting lists, and very challenging working conditions.”
“This is the time when we need to show that we value our doctors, rather than taking them for granted or suggesting they need to suffer some more.”
Below are comments from frontline ASMS members, highlighting the frustrations.
“I think most of us feel the DHBs pay lip service to us, saying we are working hard, thanking us but not wishing to increase our income”
“The last few years of this pandemic, I’ve never felt more used.”“The Government’s offer of a zero-pay increase is insulting. We are good people who do a great public service, and we deserve at least CPI.”“The years of sacrifice and highly specialised training are being diverted hour by hour into private practice or across the ditch.”“How can the DHB negotiators not realise the pain we have already endured with the extra work and stress related to Covid preparations and management on top of managing usual caseloads?”“I have seen many good colleagues leave the DHB because private or locum work is so much more lucrative and with better conditions. It seems ridiculous to pay so much for locums when you could just pay fairly and retain good permanent employees and provide a decent health service.”“We have been asked to do an awful lot more above and beyond for the past two years of Covid. For me it includes sitting in hours and hours of contingency planning meetings each week in addition to ‘business as usual’ and increased cover for absent/sick colleagues and apparently no recognition from the Board other than platitudes. Offensive really.”
In making the zero percent pay offer, the DHBs cited the Government’s public sector pay restraint policy. Three days of mediation late last year saw no change in the DHBs’ position and collective contract negotiations remain stalled.
Sarah Dalton says with inflation now running about 6%, the DHBs are offering what amounts to a significant pay cut.
The Government’s wage restraint policy has also disproportionately affected health professionals.
“New Zealand cannot hope to retain or recruit desperately needed senior doctors without some sort of meaningful wage growth. These are highly-specialised people working to keep New Zealanders safe and healthy, they should not be punished for their efforts,” Sarah Dalton says.
“We would like the Government and DHBs to front up and tell us why they think that zero percent pay offers and a ‘year of pain’ for senior hospital doctors and dentists are justified.”
The post ‘Year of Pain’ – please explain! appeared first on ASMS.

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Source: Association of Salaried Medical Specialists – Press Release/Statement:

Headline: Exhausted health staff need more than praise – pay them!

New Zealand’s understaffed, underpaid health workforce is running on empty. ASMS hit back at the Health Minister with this opinion piece on Stuff and in the Sunday Star Times.

Health Minister Andrew Little wrote last week that our hospitals are ready for Omicron. (Covid-19: Are our hospitals ready for the worst? Andrew Little says yes – Stuff 13 February)
In some respects, he is right. We have so many skilled, hard-working health care workers, who are renowned for punching above their collective weight to deliver great care.
He also noted in passing that what we have achieved so far is “at the expense of nurses and other health workers, particularly in our northern hospitals, who have worked under-staffed shifts…”
Could we just pause for a minute? Because our under-staffed, under-paid health workforce is surely deserving of more than a couple of wistful lines.
I lead the union for senior doctors and dentists.
Our workforce is primarily hospital-based and these experienced consultants, medical and dental officers are increasingly running on empty. Thanks to an unlucky guess by the State Services Commission (which gambled that our economy would tank during Covid) our members have been offered a zero-pay increase and told they might be lucky to get a 1.5% pay increase in a second year — maybe. That is all with inflation now running at nearly 6%.
Meanwhile, they are swamped by a rising tide of acutely ill patients, almost all of whom have not been sick with Covid. Senior doctors are doing their jobs amidst massive staffing gaps and insufficient beds, not to mention overstretched community-based services.
Every day our dwindling health workforce must work out who is the most acutely ill person to be seen next, where they might try to put them, and whether there are sufficient staff in place to do the mahi.
Our people are tired. They are fed up. And they are angry that this Government, which has done so many things well in keeping Covid at bay, seems to have a blind spot when it comes to caring for those who lead our health efforts.
It is not enough to keep thanking them for the great job they are doing. They, like all workers, deserve to hold an expectation that their salaries will – at the very least – keep up with inflation, rather than being rewarded with an effective pay cut.
Arbitration just found that the police, who are another group of frontline workers keeping New Zealanders safe, deserve a pay rise.
So, what about the frontline of health? Have we really reached a point at which a senior minister can gloss over the gaps in our critical health workforce in a sentence or two? Isn’t now exactly the time that we, as a community, as a nation, as a team of five million, should do more than say a casual thank you to our health workforce and pay them what they are really worth?
Sarah Dalton – Executive Director of the Association of Salaried Medical Specialists
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Source: Association of Salaried Medical Specialists – Press Release/Statement:

Headline: Senior doctors support health staff strike and share frustrations

The Association of Salaried Medical Specialists Toi Mata Hauora fully supports planned strike action by 10,000 DHB workers who belong to the Public Service Association.
The workers, who include a very broad range of health professionals such as contact tracers, lab workers and technicians, have voted to hold two 24-hour strikes next month, after 15 months of failed negotiations with DHBs. They are calling for better pay along with action on safe staffing and retention.
“As the union representing senior hospital doctors and dentists our members know how valuable these workers are and clearly see the pressures they are under,” says ASMS Executive Director Sarah Dalton.
“The fact they have been pushed into strike action is a reflection of the utter frustration with the DHBs’ and Government’s attitude to health workers’ pay and conditions.”
ASMS members increasingly feel the same way after almost a year of pay talks.
Sarah Dalton says workers across all parts of the health system have not hesitated to go the extra mile in the past two years, despite entrenched staff shortages, huge patient demand, and challenging working conditions.”
“The Government and the DHBs are taking highly skilled and trained people for granted. Making paltry or zero percent pay offers, alongside a dismissive approach to negotiations, adds insult to injury.”
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Source: Association of Salaried Medical Specialists – Press Release/Statement:

Headline: Welcome to 2022 Video

ASMS Executive Director Sarah Dalton and ASMS President Dr Julian Vyas cover a few of the big upcoming developments for 2022 including the MECA, ASMS’s new Māori Advisory Committee and the arrival of Health New Zealand and the Pae Ora legislation.
(Music: www.bensound.com)
The post Welcome to 2022 Video appeared first on ASMS.

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Source: Association of Salaried Medical Specialists – Press Release/Statement:

Headline: A Surge or Crisis Agreement

Staff safety and wellbeing is under ongoing pressure from sustained staffing shortages. The situation is likely to worsen with expected surge pressures related to Covid and, more specifically, the arrival of Omicron. We thought it would be timely to remind members that in the face of intense staff shortages or immense work pressures, ASMS recommends that departments negotiate a surge or crisis agreement. Download the PDF for more information.
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Source: Association of Salaried Medical Specialists – Press Release/Statement:

Headline: We need to declare a health workforce emergency

We know our members are carrying heavy workloads and are battling just to do business as usual with severe staffing shortages. The arrival of Omicron is set to exacerbate those staffing shortages even further. It’s time for the DHBs and the Government to acknowledge that we have a workforce emergency on our hands.  Read an opinion piece by Executive Director Sarah Dalton.

We have an undeclared health workforce emergency in Aotearoa New Zealand, and it is the elephant in the room as we prepare for Omicron to explode into the community.
There has apparently been advanced planning and modelling to help hospitals cope with an expected spike in cases and staff absences. Unfortunately, doctors who are responsible for running clinical teams and leading patient care, say that information has not been well-shared on the ground, and there is a lot of anxiety about the weeks ahead.
Looking across the Tasman last week was chilling.
In Victoria there were more than 4,000 healthcare workers who couldn’t work due to Covid isolation requirements, with 5,000 estimated absences every day on average. Health authorities took an unprecedented step of calling a system-wide ‘Code Brown’ to manage a system buckling under severe staffing shortages and hospitalisation rates amid the Omicron outbreak.
Our system is buckling under business as usual. Due to years of underinvestment in the health workforce and a woeful lack of workforce planning, we have long-term shortages of nurses, allied health staff and hospital specialists. However right now, doctors tell us they have never seen it so bad.
Emergency departments are considered the safety net of a health system and will be the frontline of an acute Omicron outbreak, yet that safety net is already at breaking point
Our EDs regularly operate at well over 120% capacity and being desperately overstretched is unfortunately now the norm not the exception. The number of code reds declared in hospitals last year, along with the issuing of health and safety PIN notices, are testament to that. The situation was magnified over the holiday period with departments trying to manage exceedingly high patient volumes with even more barren rosters. Patients in some emergency rooms were left waiting up to eight hours just to be seen. Others spent hours in ambulance bays waiting to be triaged. Then there are those who didn’t wait and left hospital without their health needs being met – many of whom were mental health patients. We are told seeing people sitting in ED corridors clutching their chest and looking unwell while waiting to be assessed is a common occurrence.
Congestion in emergency departments is compounded by staffing shortages on the wards and services everywhere are struggling to meet demand.
Lack of adequate staffing means extremely limited or no ICU capacity in some regions. In one region with very high needs, one child psychiatrist is trying to cover the work of three. In Southland maternity services are so precarious the hospital maternity unit almost had to be downgraded because a senior doctor was unable to get back into the country. In Canterbury late last year, ongoing staffing pressures saw cancer patients waiting up to 12 weeks just to get a first specialist appointment, while 365 patients were waiting for radiation therapy, with treatment delays of up to four months. Running a large waiting list is a direct consequence of an understaffed service operating above clinical capacity.
And good luck trying to get an appointment through the public system with a dermatologist or ear nose and throat specialist. We simply do not have enough of these specialists and wait times are shamefully long.
We estimate that per capita, to match Australia, New Zealand needs approximately 1500 more hospital specialists (private and public), 1400 GPs and 12,000 nurses. These are serious numbers.
An Omicron outbreak will underline just how unsustainable these staffing shortages are. New Zealanders will face more cancelled and delayed surgeries resulting in an even bigger Covid backlog.
We need to declare a health workforce emergency along the lines of a civil defence emergency, to trigger official action on staff retention and recruitment and ensure it is prioritised at central government and regional hospital and community levels.
Part of that must be to look at ways to retain people through better pay and sustainable conditions of work.
Against this backdrop of staffing pressure, it is beyond belief that senior doctors are being offered what amounts to a pay cut. They are expected to continue to go the extra mile and do more with less, while being offered no improvements in their working conditions or remuneration. DHBs and the government are quick to say how much our health workers are valued, but we are seeing nothing tangible to back up that gratitude.
For too long we’ve made a virtue of understaffing our hospitals and made a priority of balancing inadequate budgets. Now the State Services Commission expects scarce and highly skilled hospital staff to put up and shut up – without even a CPI pay adjustment while the economy surges and inflation is pushing five percent.
We are in the midst of an undeclared health workforce emergency so looking after the people we do have must be paramount. If we don’t, our valued and experienced health workers will vote with their feet.
 
As published by the NZ Herald 24/01/22
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Source: Association of Salaried Medical Specialists – Press Release/Statement:

Headline: New health leaders must focus on improving staffing and valuing workers

The Association of Salaried Medical Specialists Toi Mata Hauora says being a better employer and addressing critical staffing shortages must be top of the agenda for the country’s new health leaders.
It has been announced that Riana Manuel, currently Chief Executive of Hauraki Primary Health Organisation and iwi-based not-for-profit Te Korowai Hauora o Hauraki, will lead the new Māori Health Authority, while the new Chief Executive of Health NZ will be current Counties Manukau DHB head Fepulea’i Margie Apa.
ASMS Executive Director Sarah Dalton says, as the new national employer from July next year, Health NZ must prioritise the retention and recruitment of senior hospital doctors and dentists.
“There are basic obligations around pay and safe working conditions, which DHBs and the government are failing to meet at a time when we need to value and hang on to our critical health workers more than ever. Saying thank you is not enough,” she says.
Sarah Dalton says the ‘do more with less’ mantra from DHB managers hasn’t worked and ASMS will look to the head of Health NZ to urgently address desperate staffing shortages which are creating unsustainable working environments, burnout, and increased rationing of patient care.
“We are suffering from long-term lack of investment and failure to future-proof our health workforce. This is an opportunity to take a new, nationalised approach to workforce planning and show some real leadership,” she says.
ASMS congratulates Margie Apa and Riana Manuel on their new roles.
“We strongly urge them to listen to senior clinicians and involve them in decision-making at both the national and local level,” says Sarah Dalton.
“We all want to work to build a better health system, but it is important to remember that at the heart of every system are the people working inside it. For these health reforms to succeed, our health workers need to be supported, valued and given the recognition they deserve”.
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Source: Association of Salaried Medical Specialists – Press Release/Statement:

Headline: Meri Kirihimete – ASMS National Office Closedown

Everyone at ASMS – your National Executive and National Office staff – want to wish you and your whanau a very Merry Christmas and a happy holiday season.
Our National Office will close on Thursday 23 December and reopen again on Monday 10 January. For any queries during this period please email support@asms.nz and we will be in touch.
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