Senior medical workforce shortages must not be allowed
Senior medical workforce shortages must not be allowed to continue
“Health decision-makers and senior managers need to step up in 2017 to deal with the ongoing and often invisible struggles that senior doctors and others face to keep New Zealand’s public health system functioning,” says Ian Powell, Executive Director of the Association of Salaried Medical Specialists (ASMS).
He was commenting on today’s publication of Despatches from the front line: senior doctors talk about specialist workforce shortages in New Zealand’s public hospitals. This publication reprints articles originally published in the ASMS quarterly magazine, The Specialist, on shortages in psychiatry, dermatology, forensic pathology, gynaecological oncology, palliative medicine, rheumatology and paediatric surgery. It is available online at http://www.asms.org.nz/wp-content/uploads/2017/01/Despatches-from-the-front-line-workforce-shortages.pdf.
“What we’ve learnt from the experience of our industrial officers who deal with senior doctors every day and from the research we’ve carried out into serious issues like presenteeism and burnout is that the senior medical workforce is really feeling the pinch of ongoing resourcing constraints in the public system,” says Mr Powell.
“They’re going to work when they’re ill and they grappling with fatigue and exhaustion which often leads into burnout. They’re utterly committed to their patients and to supporting their colleagues, but the reality is that practising medicine in New Zealand’s public hospitals is increasingly a tough ask, and that needs to change. The Government and the people running our hospitals need to support this essential workforce so that we continue to have high quality public health care.”
That’s echoed by ASMS National President Dr Hein Stander who, in a foreword to the publication, says that while on the face of things the public health system appears to be coping, in fact appearances can be deceiving.
“Each year more operations are performed, there are more first specialist assessments, more hospital discharges and patient satisfaction surveys are usually highly positive,” Dr Stander writes in Despatches from the front line.
“But it is not so much a matter of what we are doing so much as what we are not able to do where the shortages bite.”
He goes on to talk about the high levels of unmet health need in communities, the pressures of a growing and aging population, and the over-burdening of senior doctors and others with workload demands.
“If the public’s perception is that the New Zealand health system is on the whole coping well, it is because the health service staff – not least the medical specialists – have so far managed to hold it together, despite the pressures, but often at the cost of their own health and wellbeing.”
He
says ASMS has produced the series of articles to put a human
face on senior medical workforce shortages and to show how
they affect the lives of both patients and medical
specialists.
ENDS