Hospitals to plan for exodus of specialists quitting over LNP doctor contracts scheme #qldpol #smoqld #keepourdoctors
QUEENSLAND public hospitals have started discussing the need for “disaster plans’’ if the Newman Government can’t resolve the dispute over doctor contracts and medical specialists start leaving the system.
The Gold Coast University Hospital’s Clinical Council first raised the issue of contingency planning last month to prepare for the possibility of doctors deserting the facility or reducing their hours in large numbers and other hospitals are following suit.
The Clinical Council advises hospital CEO Ron Calvert and the Gold Coast Hospital and Health Service board on issues relating to patient safety and risk. Mr Calvert had no comment yesterday.
Princess Alexandra Hospital’s clinical council has called an extraordinary meeting for Monday, to discuss similar disaster planning in light of the contentious contracts and emergency medicine specialists across the state have scheduled “crisis talks’’ next Tuesday night.
The meetings will go ahead despite a Government backdown on Thursday, agreeing to reopen talks with the medical profession on the contracts.
Australian Salaried Medical Officers Federation Queensland branch president Nick Buckmaster said: “We need to start looking at what would occur, if many doctors resign and how we could make sure that we could preserve essential services.”
MP DEFENDS THREAT TO QUIT OVER DOCTOR CONTRACTS
LNP frontbencher Dr Chris Davis says he has no regrets about speaking out against his Government’s controversial doctor contracts and indicated he is still prepared to resign if the dispute is not fairly resolved.
The Assistant Health Minister has defended his decision to distribute a letter to fellow MPs threatening to resign the post, but leave Health Minister Lawrence Springborg off the list.
He maintained he had distributed the letter to “a limited number of MPs” who had shared his concerns about the shift to doctor contracts, but has staunchly rejected distributing it to the media.
The letter states his position had been made “untenable” by the contract dispute.
It caught LNP Ministers, including Mr Springborg, off guard when it was reported on the nightly news after the party room meeting on Monday.
Dr Davis told The Courier-Mail yesterday that he was a “team player” and decided to verbally air his concerns at the party room meeting rather than distribute the letter more widely.
The former Australian Medical Association Queensland president said he was just “a messenger”.
“If you cross-examine your skin and see a melanoma or check your breasts for lumps, and if you don’t do something about it, it can end really badly,” he said. “So I don’t regret at all having done the listening, done the looking and acting on it in a way I thought was most responsible.”
Dr Davis said he and other Liberal National MPs had been inundated with letters about the dispute.
“It was an issue for the entire team because we are all affected really, we all have constituents who are patients, many of our constituents are doctors,” he said.
“If we are losing our very best people then I would take that as a personal failure in a sense, and I couldn’t just be there while that was happening so we needed to fix it.”
Dr Davis said his focus was on talks next week to find a solution, but he would not rule out stepping down.
“We will really continue to just hope and pray for the best outcome and so I really don’t want to anticipate that we might fail on this,” Dr Davis said.
“Clearly if we don’t have a success I might have to revisit this.”
Mr Springborg rejected the suggestion that Dr Davis’s letter was responsible for reopening talks with doctors after a torrid week of argument over the issue.
“I think we have had a coincidence with regard to the meetings,” Mr Springborg said.
“Already myself and the Premier had invited Dr Hambleton about two to three weeks ago to actually discuss any issues of concern around the implementation of those contracts without revising the old ground,” he said.
“That’s what actually started it. The fact we have always been prepared to sit around the table and discuss that and we’ve been able to get a good platform for that.”