By Angus Thomson
Hundreds of patients have been told their planned surgeries will not go ahead over the next three days as some of Sydney’s busiest hospitals brace for an unprecedented doctors’ strike.
On Monday, Health Minister Ryan Park asked all non-urgent patients to avoid the state’s emergency departments over the next three days and again urged the doctors’ union – the Australian Salaried Medical Officers’ Federation (ASMOF) NSW – to call off the strike.
Intensive care specialist and union delegate Dr Behny Samadi says staff have been left with “no choice” but to take industrial action.Credit: Thomas Wielecki
“I’m not going to pretend … thousands of doctors can withdraw their labour and their work, and that won’t have an impact on emergency departments and elective surgery across the board,” Park said.
“That alone will see hundreds of individuals have important life-changing surgery scrapped … if someone can tell me that’s not going to have an impact on patient wellbeing and patient safety, then they’re running a different health system.”
Park said he was most concerned about the impact of the strike on Westmead, St George, Royal Prince Alfred and Prince of Wales hospitals, large tertiary hospitals with busy emergency departments.
Patients could face longer waits at Westmead Hospital’s already-busy emergency department.Credit: Dean Sewell
A senior doctor at Westmead, who requested anonymity to speak freely about internal discussions, said about 400 doctors at the hospital had registered to strike but would be available to work shifts maintaining emergency services.
“[Doctors] might not come to work during the day, but if they’re on call after-hours, they will turn up for those shifts, and if they want to participate in the strikes, they would be making arrangements to have someone cover for them,” the doctor said.
Hospital doctors are demanding a single-year pay rise of up to 30 per cent to match wages in other states. The government has offered 10.5 per cent over three years.
ASMOF did not provide exact figures on how many doctors would walk out at each hospital, but the union expected more than 5000 members at 32 hospitals to participate in the statewide strike.
NSW Health acting secretary Matthew Daly said the information sent by ASMOF so far was “haphazard”, making it difficult for hospitals to plan.
“We’ve been pleading with the union to provide us with precise details of the staffing that will be provided so that we can actually make a judgment call as to the level of risk,” he said.
More than 700 surgeries were cancelled on one day of the nurses and midwives’ strike last year, and Park said on Monday that he expected a similar number to be affected by the doctors’ strikes.
Dr Behny Samadi, a Sydney-based intensive care specialist and ASMOF delegate, apologised for the surgery delays but said doctors had been left with “no choice” but to strike after 18 months of negotiations.
“We want to work, but we have been stretched so thin for so long, and our cries for help have fallen on deaf ears,” Samadi said. “Many people have been waiting months or years for their elective surgery, which, again, typifies the problem in NSW Health.”
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