Strikers bending law, say hospitals

Photo / Paul Estcourt

District health boards have accused unions of manipulating the legal controls on health-worker strikes, putting patients' safety at risk.

They have listed the potential harm caused by rolling industrial action by radiographers and laboratory workers - including delayed diagnosis of liver cancer in two Auckland patients.

They want the Government to impose tougher controls.

But the unions have hit back.

"DHBs have opted to suspend much of the medical laboratory workforce in some laboratories which has had a far more dramatic effect on patients than any of the partial strikes the medical laboratory workers themselves have been participating in," said Medical Laboratory Workers Union president Stewart Smith.

Union members at Middlemore Hospital's lab were due to return to work from midnight last night, after a 48-hour total withdrawal of labour.

Senior DHB bureaucrats and doctors held a media conference in Wellington yesterday to slam the two unions for their months-long campaign of industrial action, including several full walkouts. Most of the 20 DHBs have been affected by the radiographers' action; fewer, but also the Blood Service, by the lab workers.

It is the work-to-rule tactic, overtime bans and other activities which the unions pitch as "lower-level action" that have brought the DHBs to yesterday's point of exasperation.

Health unions taking industrial action are legally bound to provide cover for services needed to preserve life or prevent permanent disability.

But Hutt Valley DHB chairman Peter Glensor said these regulations under the Employment Relations Act needed to be reviewed.

"We believe the life-preserving services [provision] needs to be clear that patient safety is completely paramount and the kind of gaming we believe is beginning to emerge needs to stop because it's people's lives that are being put at risk."

Capital and Coast DHB's chief medical officer, Dr Geoffrey Robinson, went further and said the Government must urgently review the laws allowing health workers to strike and urged compulsory arbitration, which is available in setting police pay.

But Health Minister Tony Ryall said the Government did not intend to impose compulsory arbitration. Nor were there any formal proposals to change the life-preserving services provisions.

A spokeswoman for the radiographers' union, Bernadette Gourley, rejected the suggestion its industrial action was harming patients, saying anyone at risk of permanent disability or in a life-threatening situation or with a serious illness would always be seen by radiographers. DHBs could also choose to have less serious cases imaged privately.

THE IMPACT
Health board examples of patients affected by radiographers and laboratory workers' action:

* Two Auckland patients whose scans were deferred found to have inoperable liver cancer.

* Blood supply at first refused, then delayed, for an Auckland patient haemorrhaging in an operating theatre.

* An Auckland patient with a lung clot waited 8 hours for a scan.