KEY POINTS:
The Government is to make changes to industrial relations rules to ensure greater patient safety when health workers go on strike.
Health Minister Pete Hodgson has conceded patient safety had been put at risk in the latest of a series of strikes to hit district health boards.
Labour Minister Ruth Dyson said yesterday she intended to make changes to the Code of Good Faith for the Public Health Sector in the Employment Relations Act.
Moves are under way to clarify an employment grey area that allows for striking health workers to break strike action only to preserve life - and not necessarily where there is risk of permanent disability.
The Code of Good Faith requires health providers to provide for patient safety during industrial action by ensuring life preserving services are maintained. But the interpretation in the schedule does not explicitly mention permanent disability, leaving it open as to whether life preserving services means preventing death and nothing more.
The recent seven-day medical laboratory workers' strike exposed what the senior doctors' union and Council of Trade Unions saw as a legislative flaw.
The CTU and its health unions (senior doctors, the Public Service Association and the Nurses Organisation) negotiated an agreement with DHBs in 2003 that covered life-preserving services and permanent disability.
Ian Powell, executive director of the Association of Salaried Medical Specialists representing senior doctors, said: "Rightly or wrongly, during the recent laboratory workers' strike, DHBs believed that risk of permanent disability was not covered by the act. This helped place undue pressure on senior doctors."
He said the clarification would go a long way towards better protecting the right to strike in the health sector.
