BY ALEX BAINBRIDGE
HOBART — "If doctors in public hospitals were only concerned about money, they wouldn't be working in the public system" said Dr Kamala Emanuel in defence of the campaign by doctors to win improvements in their conditions of employment. Emanuel, a general practitioner was responding to the arguments used by state Labor health minister Judy Jackson to attack public hospital doctors.
The doctors won a victory on May 11 when the state health department agreed to pay a 16.5% pay rise over three years backdated to February. Prior to this agreement, Jackson had slandered doctors as being greedy for rejecting a previous health department offer which Jackson claimed averaged $270 per week over three years.
Tim Greenaway of the Tasmanian Salaried Medical Practitioners Society told Green Left Weekly that the doctors' claim was primarily motivated by a desire to address problems in attracting and maintaining staff specialists in the public system. Greenaway said Jackson's comments were "misleading" and ignored measures the doctors have been pushing for to improve staff retention.
There is currently a severe shortage of specialists in public hospitals which the government is "patching with locums and VMOs [Visiting Medical Officers]" according to Greenaway. In some areas like obstetrics and gynaecology the shortages are particularly acute.
The April 19 Mercury reported comments by Dr Stuart Day that the cost of providing "stop-gap relief for shortages in key medical salaried positions in Tasmanian public hospitals" already amounted to "hundreds of thousands of dollars". This is not much less than the total cost of the doctors' pay rise but stability of medical staff would result in better health care for patients.
Emanuel, who is a member of the Democratic Socialist Party, told Green Left Weekly that while the government is making savings by not filling all vacancies and not staffing hospitals adequately, the cost is borne by patients.
It has been some time since hospital doctors received a pay rise, according to Greenaway. The doctors' award expired in October 2000. Their original claim for a 25% pay rise was derived from an average of the base rates of pay for salaried medical officers interstate after excluding the additional benefits which are usually included in mainland salary packages.
This was lowered to 18.5% after the health department responded that Tasmanian salaries should also have been included in the modelling, thus lowering the average. Even then industrial action, including bans on elective surgery, was required to win 16.5% rise from the government.
One outcome of the doctors' campaign was the establishment of a statewide working group, including doctors and hospital management, to identify which areas need staffing and to make proposals to attract staff to these jobs.
"Many workers, including nurses and other hospital workers, deserve pay rises of at least $300 per week over three years after two decades of wage restraint and erosion of conditions" according to Emanuel. "We should support the doctors' claim since wage rises for workers in strong positions can exercise an upward pull on wages for others.
"Instead of making health funding a priority, Labor Premier Jim Bacon's government has allowed the department to limp along with inadequate funding since its election in 1998. This hasn't stopped the state government from promising cuts in payroll tax for business in the upcoming budget. It hasn't stopped the government from pursuing deals like Bacon's gift of $4.5 million last year to mining company Renison Bell — a gift that did not stop that company from announcing the sacking of 90 workers on May 16. There are alternatives to the current pro-business bias of Labor and Liberal governments and that is why socialists say priorities have to change."