KEY POINTS:
Two patient safety watchdogs, concerned at the risk of people being harmed by the junior doctors' strike, are calling for a new way to settle pay disputes in the health sector.
Health and Disability Commissioner Ron Paterson and Medical Council chairman Professor John Campbell spoke out yesterday, the second day of the strike by more than 2000 junior doctors.
The strike ends today at 7am but their union intends to strike again, for 49 hours, from 7am on May 7. This will again leave acute and emergency patients to the care of nurses and senior doctors and cause the postponement of thousands of elective surgeries and outpatient appointments.
Hospitals reported light attendances at emergency departments yesterday as people heeded their requests to see a GP for non-urgent matters.
Mr Paterson said health-worker strikes caused people a great deal of psychological distress, especially those waiting for elective surgery or an outpatient visit. There was also evidence of actual physical harm.
"It's entirely unsatisfactory to have what are becoming rolling strikes. It's a totally unacceptable situation for the public and for all the people working in hospitals who are left to pick up the pieces.
"I worry about the rifts it creates between junior and senior doctors. When so many of the cases where things go wrong have involved poor communication between junior and senior doctors, this is not an encouraging development."
Mr Paterson rejected the union's argument that the strike is warranted to ensure adequate numbers in the future specialist workforce through big pay rises to help stem the staff losses to higher-paid jobs in Australia and in the New Zealand locum market.
"I'm not convinced that that justifies the harm to the patients who suffer in the meantime. We are never going to be able to match - or even necessarily come close - to the salaries on offer across the Tasman or in other parts of the world."
He urged the health sector to devise different ways to resolve pay disputes.
Professor Campbell said during the 2006 junior doctors' strike: "Ways of compulsory arbitration need to be explored ... "
Yesterday, he refused to be drawn on arbitration and said banning strikes would be "too black and white" and against the current legislative right to strike. But he agreed with Mr Paterson that alternatives to strikes - which he termed a failure of the current wage-setting process - must be explored.
Health Minister David Cunliffe was unavailable to comment but his predecessor, Pete Hodgson, said in 2006, regarding health-worker strikes, that he was comfortable with existing industrial relations legislation.
Health unions are not keen on compulsory arbitration, nor on giving up the right to strike.
District health boards spokesman David Meates would not comment on whether they wanted the legislation changed, but he said they needed to find a new way to engage with the junior doctors and other unions that represented a small part of the health workforce but which took by far the most industrial action.
Labour Minister Trevor Mallard said there were no plans to introduce compulsory bargaining into any sector, but the Employment Relations Authority could in certain circumstances make non-binding recommendations on the terms and conditions of a collective agreement through "facilitation".
EVIDENCE OF HARM
* A man suffered a stroke in 2006 during the strike by medical radiation technologists while he was waiting for an MRI scan.
* His case was not considered to have passed the test for calling striking staff back to work - that it was necessary to preserve life.
* The man recovered but a complaint was made to the Health and Disability Commissioner, who is investigating.
* The legal criteria for call-outs were later expanded to include avoidance of the risk of permanent disability.
* In another case cited by the commissioner, a woman died after an aneurism ruptured while she was waiting for a semi-urgent brain x-ray.
* The procedure was postponed because of the technologists' strike.
* A post-mortem was not done, so it is unclear what caused her death and whether it could be attributed to her care.
