Hospitals coping without striking doctors

Hospitals say they are coping well despite the loss of more than 2000 junior doctors who walked off the job for 48 hours yesterday.

Health Minister David Cunliffe said contingency plans were working and there were no patient safety problems, even though the hospitals were about 90 per cent full Beauty Health.

Hospitals prepare for the staff shortage by postponing thousands of surgical operations and discharging all patients who were able to go home.

Many hospitals had also taken out advertisements urging people to go to their GP rather than turning up to the emergency department if they did not have a real emergency.

The junior doctors say they want a 30 per cent pay rise over the next three years but their District Health Board (DHB) employers say the demands cannot be met.

The doctors say a base rate of $23 an hour is way too low for the job they do, while DHBs say it equates to a very adequate average annual wage well in excess of $80,000.

Yesterday the doctors' union New Zealand Resident Doctors Association (NZRDA) announced further strike action would follow, with doctors walking off the job again for two days on May 7.

The announcement was criticised by the senior doctors' union, the Association of Salaried Medical Specialists, who are due to ratify their own pay deal with the DHBs on May 8.

Union president Jeff Brown told The Dominion Post the timing of the junior doctors' second strike "may make it incredibly difficult to have that meeting".

Dr Brown said it would not be easy to postpone the meeting as it had come at the end of a two-year negotiation process.

He said they had been open about the date of the meeting and he could not understand why his colleagues chose it Beauty Health.

"I would hate to think it's a deliberate thing."

Marcia Walker from the NZRDA said the doctors were angry at the lack of headway being made in negotiations and their aggressive stance appeared to be the only way to tackle the situation.

"Our patients are being negatively affected now and the situation is getting worse by the day, so we can't really wait any longer, we need to get some action happening now," Ms Walker said.

"We've been in negotiations for nearly 12 months now with absolutely no movement and we just can't let it slip any longer."

DHBs spokesman David Meates said the threat of more strikes "beggared belief".

"This union should be more concerned about finding a way to solve the dispute rather than trying to prolong it."

Meanwhile, hospitals in Southland, Palmerston North, Wanganui and Waitemata have denied they are in danger of closing because of the staff shortages.

NZRDA general secretary Deborah Powell said the pay rise was needed to stem staff shortages which threatened to close regional hospitals, many of which had one junior doctor doing the work of five.

Senior clinicians at Palmerston North and Southland hospitals said while there could be problems getting staff at times, there was no truth in the statement that the hospitals were in danger of closure.

National leader John Key told Breakfast TV that junior doctors should not be given a 30 per cent pay rise but they had to get a "better deal" because New Zealand could not afford to keep losing them to Australia and the rest of the world.

Asked whether junior doctors should get a 30 to 40 per cent hike, he said "no".

Doctors earned "quite a lot" and whether they earned enough to keep them in New Zealand was a different story but under National's tax cut plan, they would "do pretty well", Mr Key said.