Doctors Strike - First in 30 years. Should they?

[Francesca R]

This is fun, but if you have a location listed I can't see it because I'm on a mobile app.

 

[Rolfe]

I make it here. Looks nice. Lovely day.

https://maps.google.co.uk/maps?q=Be...oid=lH-hwIQw6go46Sus_H6vfQ&cbp=12,86.1,,0,0.4

Depends on the precision of the reference of course, but it's in that general vicinity.

Rolfe.

 

[Francesca R]

Right. The use of "GP" threw me and is not a term used in the US, but that's what we call them in NZ too (I got me dual citizenship). NZ has co-payment and getting an appointment is very quick in my experience, always same day.

As for my (current) location dunno if this works.

 

[Rolfe]

Yes, that works. Looks very chic.

Rolfe.

 

[psionl0]

I make it here. Looks nice. Lovely day.

https://maps.google.co.uk/maps?q=Be...oid=lH-hwIQw6go46Sus_H6vfQ&cbp=12,86.1,,0,0.4

Depends on the precision of the reference of course, but it's in that general vicinity.

Rolfe.

Yep, my address is within 30 seconds of arc from that location. I don't know who lives in that house but I have driven past it.

Perth weather is nice most of the time and November is an especially good time. The wet season is well and truly over and there are still plenty of days where the temperature is below 30º C (86º F).

Back on topic, what we have in Australia today is the logical result of 30 years of having a medical system where you can get free treatment as a public patient at a hospital (after joining a long queue) or, if you are privately insured, you can pay a massive gap to be treated privately.

 

[Beerina]

Lots of medical job openings, come on over!

 

[Arrow]

Well, as surprising as this sounds, a strike might be good news for residence in the UK. People are more likely to live longer as a result. English physician John Briffa wrote about this possibility recently.

"Some potentially good news for UK patients: doctors may go out on strike"

excerpt from his article:

The UK Government is broke, and is doing it’s best to spend as little money as possible, including on pensions. It’s offered state-employed doctors here a pension deal, but the doctors are not happy about it and now there’s talk of strike action. The situation may seem dire for patients who will not have as much access to medical care. However, if history is anything to go by, a doctors’ strike may in fact be a cause for celebration.

I say that because back in the year 2000, many Israeli doctors went out on strike for about three months. This coincided with a very real drop in mortality rates. The situation was reported in the British Medical Journal [1], and I remember reading the article at the time. Here are some quotes from it:

Industrial action by doctors in Israel seems to be good for their patients’ health. Death rates have dropped considerably in most of the country since physicians in public hospitals implemented a programme of sanctions three months ago, according to a survey of burial societies.

The Israel Medical Association began the action on 9 March [2000]… Since then, hundreds of thousands of visits to outpatient clinics have been cancelled or postponed along with tens of thousands of elective operations.

In the absence of official figures, the Jerusalem Post surveyed non-profit making Jewish burial societies, which perform funerals for the vast majority of Israelis, to find out whether the industrial action was affecting deaths in the country.

“The number of funerals we have performed has fallen drastically,” said Hananya Shahor, the veteran director of Jerusalem’s Kehilat Yerushalayim burial society. “This month, there were only 93 funerals compared with 153 in May 1999, 133 in the same month in 1998, and 139 in May 1997,” he said.

Meir Adler, manager of the Shamgar Funeral Parlour, which buries most other residents of Jerusalem, declared with much more certainty: “There definitely is a connection between the doctors’ sanctions and fewer deaths. We saw the same thing in 1983 [when the Israel Medical Association applied sanctions for four and a half months].”

Motti Yeshuvayov of Tel Aviv’s only burial society said that he had noticed the same trend in the Tel Aviv metropolitan area in the past two months.

There are reports of similar drops in death rates when doctors have gone on strike in Canada and Los Angeles (though I’ve not been able to confirm the veracity of these reports) .

I don’t want to denigrate the whole of conventional medicine. Actually, some aspects of it (high-tech diagnostics, surgery and emergency medicine, for example) I think are broadly genuinely worthwhile. However, a lot of what we do in medicine I think is not as effective as we’ve perhaps been led to believe. It can also be very hazardous (and take lives) of course.

the rest can be seen at:

http://www.drbriffa.com/2012/01/19/...for-uk-patients-doctors-may-go-out-on-strike/

 

[jhunter1163]

As an American, I have a hard time getting my head around the idea that doctors are allowed to strike. Here, public-safety employees (police, firefighters and physicians) are legally barred from striking, no matter how legitimate their grievances might be.

 

[Francesca R]

As far as I know only the armed forces and the police are disallowed from striking in the UK. Firefighters have certainly been on strike before (which results in supposedly politically embarrassing scenes of the army providing emergency backup with 50-year old fire engines). I think prison officers have as well.

The lack of right to strike has generally been traded for separate industrial relations mechanisms, and these professions have also typically had significantly more generous retirement benefits. Both the lack of ability to strike and the higher benefits are ostensibly the result of the "essential service" nature of the job. Such strikes that have occurred have IIRC resulted from government legislation to scale back the benefits (as has been done everywhere else)

Whether the public supports industrial action in these professions depends on which point of view prevails, from the extremes of: (i) unsung heroes/heroines being beaten down by nasty government and simply unable to take it any more, or (ii) gross dereliction of duty by essential workers who are supposed to be dedicated and have 'gold plated' benefits compared to everyone else in the country.