Doctors will defy day-off order

Press, 17 June 1988, Page 1

Doctors will defy day-off order

By

SARAH SANDS

Junior doctors have voted to disregard restrictions on their working hours in defiance of a directive from the Canterbury Hospital Board.

The board’s now discontinued cost-control committee decided late last month to restrict the working hours of the junior doctors (residental medical officers) in an effort to reduce spending. Proposals to restrict the hours of house surgeons to 48 hours a week and registrars to 56 hours a week included rostering days off during the week. R.M.O.S who work at the weekends now do so on overtime rates and do not receive a day off during the week in lieu. About 150 of the 225 R.M.O.S employed by the board attended a stop-work meeting this week and voted to reject the restrictions. The R.M.O.S have given notice to the board that they will continue to work and claim payments on timesheets for rostered days off during the week. The board’s acting general manager, Mr Ron Parker, has warned that any R.M.O. who worked on a rostered day off would not be paid for that day. The industrial officer in the South Island for the Resident Medical Officers’ Association, Mr Tony Mather, saidyesterday that if the board did not pay, .R.M.O.S would file a claim for recovery of wages. R.M.O.S were concerned that the rostered days off during the week would affect their education and the continuity of patient care, said Mr Mather. • "These people are apprentices. What apprentice carpenter has a day off during the week and works on a Saturday when he has not got a tradesman working with him? "It is Important that the R.M.O.s be with the people who teach them and these people work during the week, Monday to Friday,” he said. Rostered days off during the week would affect patient care because many clinics saw patients Monday to Friday only. “If there are fewer doctors to service these clinics, fewer patients will be seen,” Mr Mather said. R.M.O.S had ideas for cost saving that they were prepared

to discuss with the board if only it would listen. “R.M.O.S are concerned that their employer has changed what they see as their terms of employment without any discussion,” he said. "As far as we are concerned they have not negotiated the changes with us so we deem that no changes have taken place.” If the board was prepared to discuss the concerns of the R.M.O.S, Mr Mather said, "we would be more than happy to sit down and say why what they are doing is unacceptable.” The board’s acting general manager, Mr Ron Parker, said yesterday that he had not received written notice of the action by R.M.O.S. “We have not made a decision on what to do because we have not received the letter yet.” “Because we have not considered it officially, I am only going on hearsay. But if someone was rostered off and came into work, they would not be paid.” The medical superintendents of the board’s hospitals, who were responsible for rostering R.M.O.S, had been instructed of the board’s goal to restrict the hours, said Mr Parker. “However, the board has given the medical superintendents flexibility to roster beyond those hours if they believe patient care would be jeopardised to any significant degree,” he said. Mr Parker said that the working hours the board was trying to restrict the R.M.O.S to were not short. “There is a great drama now that everything is going to be affected yet they are still going to be doing 50 or 60 hours a week in round figures. That is a significant number of hours for anybody,” he said. “This has to be taken in perspective. How effective is someone at the workface when they are working more than 60 hours a week? Is that in the interests of patient care?” In 1985, when R.M.O.S had been campaigning for reduced hours, the opinion was that long hours were not good for patient care, said Mr Parker.