Things are serious right now. It is a serious thing for senior doctors to go on strike today, they've never done this before.
And I can totally understand why- they must be at their wits end with the silly games Te Whatu Ora are playing to avoid paying doctors properly.
For a start, the health bosses misrepresented what the senior doctors actually get paid already. They said these doctors get, on average, $318,000 per year. But that is clearly not true.
Check out the collective agreement online, the top pay is $250,000 and the median is $220,000.
Either way, it’s a lot of money, but Te Whatu Ora Health NZ can let us make up our own minds with the honest facts instead of being dishonest.
As well as that, they’ve misrepresented what they’re offering the doctors. They said up to 12.9 percent, which sounds like a lot- but we found out that they dicked around with that number too, and it's not nearly that much.
It’s more like 5 percent, say the doctors.
The reason I'm cross about this is that we don’t get the luxury of paying our doctors poorly in this country. Doctors can move, and if you pay them poorly- they’re just going to go off to Australia.
Particularly Victoria, where the lowest they can earn there is more than the highest they can earn here. My brother-in-law, a doctor, just left for Victoria. My neighbour, also a doctor, left a couple of years back.
If the health bosses continue to play these games with our doctors and try to dick them around on pay, we will lose more. And we can’t afford to, because we’re already 1700 doctors short in this country.
That means you and I will not get the healthcare we actually deserve because we pay our taxes for it.
So instead of Health NZ using their 200 communications staff to figure out clever ways to make doctors look greedy, how about they find some money to pay doctors properly.
And if they need to cut some of those back-office spin doctors who play slippery games to find the dollars, so be it. I'd rather have the doctors anyway.
Heather du Plessis-Allan is a journalist and commentator who hosts Newstalk ZB's Drive show.
1 comment:
Great to see the money tree is still alive and well for those already earning large sums.
Those at the bottom, they get the under watered, dry and twisted money tree that no longer produces anything.
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