Queensland Health Minister Lawrence Springborg says he has extended the deadline for senior doctors to sign up to new individual contracts.
Mr Springborg says the Government has made a breakthrough in the long and bitter dispute with public hospital doctors.
He says he got Cabinet approval yesterday to change the controversial new contracts for senior doctors, to address their concerns about transfers and dispute resolution.
Mr Springborg says unions and other representative groups have now signed letters of support for the new agreements.
He says they are some of the concession made by both sides.
“Also doctors indicated they would be happy not to go forward with the mass resignation campaign,” Mr Springborg said.
“This is a significant relief for all parties who have been involved in this.
“I always knew that we would be able to resolve this and I always knew there was a real desire among doctors to resolve this as well.”
Mr Springborg says in return, he has extended the deadline for doctors to sign up until the end of May, despite earlier saying it was not possible to extend the April 30 contract deadline.
“What’s happened here is real emerging goodwill between the Government, the department and doctors representatives in the last few weeks,” he said.
“Given the issues which were of concern to doctors, as raised by their representatives, I and their representatives can see no reason why doctors should not feel confident in signing these individual contracts.”
Doctors to vote on contracts on Wednesday
Australian Medical Association president Dr Steve Hambleton says it will ultimately be up to individual doctors to decide whether they will sign.
“We believe that there’s a satisfactory outcome on the table for doctors,” he said.
“It is certainly important to emphasise that each individual doctor needs to make an individual decision, but it certainly appears that we are a position that mass resignations are no longer required.”
The Australian Salaried Medical Officers Federation (ASMOF) says it is still only an in-principle agreement.
It says there are still a few key matters that need to be resolved before a mass meeting of doctors scheduled for Wednesday night.
Together union spokesman, Cairns doctor Sandy Donald, says while the contracts still need to be finalised, significant progress has been made.
“There’s been changes to the wording of a lot of different parts of the contract,” he said.
“There were a lot of areas that gave the doctors almost no power to influence decisions and also a lot of areas we felt were open to misinterpretation.”
Dr Donald says Mr Springborg is meeting with several doctors in Cairns today and hopes some existing resignations can be withdrawn.
“One of things we’ve requested is that people who have submitted resignations based on the previous version of the contract be given the opportunity to do that,” he said.
“I’m not sure there’s been formal agreement that that opportunity will be offered, but clearly that would make sense.”
Source : ABC