Payment Of Hospital Specialists Attacked

Press, Volume CII, Issue 30038, 24 January 1963, Page 14

Payment Of Hospital Specialists Attacked

Concern at conditions under which medical specialists worked in the New Zealand hospital service were criticised yesterday by Dr. A. F. Burry, who recently resigned as pathologist to the Princess Margaret Hospital and secretary to the New Zealand Society of Pathologists to take up a post in Brisbane. He later left by air for Australia. He was at least the third of the younger generation of specialists who had left Christchurch for overseas in the last few months for reasons reflecting the unsatisfactory status of specialists in New Zealand, said Ek. Burry. The conditions which evoked his concern applied not only to the full-time hospital worker, but also to visiting specialists. Hospital service rates of payment, he said, were frequently at a level equal to no more than half what a young general practitioner could earn two or three years out of his house-surgeon year. Yet specialists, to become properly qualified, had to study and work in hospitals tor at least four years past th« house-surgeon level; moreover, the specialists were responsible for medical educrtion, both in the teaching in.titutions and through their consultant services to general practitioners. “Much is made of the difficult and arduous working conditions of the general practitioner, but with the Insry*”*,. tendency towards partnership and group practice these hardship are, I believe, frequently exaggerated, said Dr. Burry. “Salaries in specialist work should J* “®ciently high to attract the most able of the medi- £*• firaduates of the country, the New Zealand has a poor position in comparison with his fellow in the United Kingdom.?

Dr. Burry also stacked the grading system by which specialists’ salaries were assessed. There should be a salary for a particular post, but instead the salary seemed to be attached to the man, with a ceiling for the post. This meant that a specialist often did not know what his salary for an advertised position would be until after he had been appointed.