Data and insight

Sarah Dalton | Executive Director

Last month we sent you a brief note asking you to help us make sure we have your current contact details. We also asked you to share some ethnicity information with us.

Firstly, thanks so much to those of you who’ve grabbed some time to respond – we really appreciate it! Secondly, a few words about why it’s helpful to know a little more about you, both individually and as a cohort. There is a saying, “You can’t improve what you don’t measure”.

We have a serious and intense focus on all things workforce this year: MECA pay and conditions, staff shortages, mechanisms to achieve safe work, and so on. Part of this focus includes the establishment of an ASMS Ma -ori Advisory Committee, and new research into our sizeable IMG workforce. Knowing a little bit more about how you identify and whakapapa helps to ensure we include you in our conversations, research and advocacy. We know ASMS has a diverse membership, but knowing exactly how diverse and in what ways has sometimes slipped through our net. We also continue to ask about gender. We have moved past old-school binaries but remain interested in gender identities as well, especially given the documented gender pay gap in medicine, which we continue to work on.

We know ASMS has a diverse membership, but knowing exactly how diverse and in what ways has sometimes slipped through our net.

We have a number of individual gender pay and wrong salary step cases in progress. We have also stepped away from a shared project with TAS that was aimed at addressing gender pay across the DHBs. Unfortunately, they proved unwilling to overcome barriers put up by the employers around required payroll data collection and analysis. We are now collecting the data ourselves in order to tackle the gender pay gap systematically. I apologise over how long this is taking; however, we will not give up while the gap remains, and will continue to work hard to stop historical inequalities being perpetuated.

What you can do

• Make sure local and departmental agreements for after-hours work are documented and reviewed.

• Make sure that retention and recruitment payments are appropriately labelled and documented.

• Insist that special contributions are appropriately identified and documented.

• Ask for all local arrangements to be shared across the SMO group. • Put processes in place to make sure that these are regularly reviewed and open for discussion. The MECA is very clear on the importance of fair and equitable scale placements, and about the rules for recruitment, retention, and special contributions. Our industrial staff can help with all of these. We are also aware that some employers are insisting on offering remedies to individual SMOs only if they agree to a confidential settlement. This means that while one senior doctor gets their issue resolved, no one else does, and inequities remain. We maintain that the DHBs that are trying to push this barrow are acting in bad faith. We’ve raised it with new Health NZ Chief Executive Margie Apa already and made it very clear that this will not be tolerated.

Remember that you can help stop unequal terms and conditions.

These are strange times. On the one hand I’m engaged in discussions focused on how to co-construct decent workplace cultures and conditions where unions and workers have a voice and a say, and on the other, we have our MECA negotiations being forced into facilitated bargaining due to an employer team which refuses to engage and whose stock answer to our proposals across the table has been “no offer”.

We know that almost all the people you currently report to and work alongside will still be there doing the same things on 1 July. We know that Health NZ’s agenda for change will be incremental by necessity. We also know that any government aspirations that somehow a new system will save us all money is completely the wrong impetus for change. We have to remain optimistic that genuine engagement across our health workforce, and a solid dose of clinically led decisionmaking, will help us find a way through to a better, safer working environment. Thank you for helping us to do our best to keep on helping you. Ki te kotahi te ka -kaho, ka whati; ki te ka -puia, e kore e whati.

If a reed stands alone, it can be broken; if it is in a group, it cannot.