Hundreds of Surgeries Cancelled as Doctors Across NSW Strike

As some of Sydney’s hospitals are preparing for a doctors’ strike, hundreds of patients being told that their planned surgeries will not go ahead.

On Monday, Health Minister Ryan Park asked all non-urgent patients to avoid the state’s emergency departments over the next three days, and again urged the doctors’ union – the Australian Salaried Medical Officers’ Federation (ASMOF) NSW – to call off the strike.

“I’m not going to pretend … thousands of doctors can withdraw their labour and their work, and that won’t have an impact on emergency departments and elective surgery across the board,” Park said.

“That alone will see hundreds of individuals have important life-changing surgery scrapped … if someone can tell me that’s not going to have an impact on patient wellbeing and patient safety, then they’re running a different health system.”

Park said the hospitals he was most concerned about were Westmead, St George, Royal Prince Alfred, and Prince of Wales, which are large tertiary hospitals with very busy emergency departments.

A senior doctor at Westmead, who spoke to SMH about internal discussions on the condition he stay anonymous, said about 400 doctors at the hospital had registered to strike but would remain available to work shifts to maintain emergency services.

“[Doctors] might not come to work during the day, but if they’re on call after-hours, they will turn up for those shifts, and if they want to participate in the strikes, they would be making arrangements to have someone cover for them,” the doctor said.

Doctors have been left “no choice”.

Hospital doctors are striking to demand a single-year pay rise of up ot 30 per cent to match the wages in other states.

While ASMOF didn’t provide exact figures on how many doctors would walk out of each hospital, the union expected more than 5000 members across 32 hospitals to participate in the statewide strike.

Matthew Daly, the NSW Health acting secretary, said the information sent by ASMOF so far was “haphazard”, making it difficult for hospitals to plan.

“We’ve been pleading with the union to provide us with precise details of the staffing that will be provided so that we can actually make a judgment call as to the level of risk,” he said.

One day of the nurses and midwives’ strike last year caused more than 700 surgeries to be cancelled, and Park said on Monday that he expected a similar number to be affected by the doctors’ strikes.

Dr Behny Samadi, a Sydney-based intensive care specialist and ASMOF delegate, apologised for the surgery delays but said doctors had been left with “no choice” but to strike after 18 months of negotiations.

“We want to work, but we have been stretched so thin for so long, and our cries for help have fallen on deaf ears,” Samadi said. “Many people have been waiting months or years for their elective surgery which, again, typifies the problem in NSW Health.”