AMA Transcript - AMA President Dr Steve Hambleton, Doorstop, Royal Brisbane Hospital, Queensland Hospital contracts

DR STEVE HAMBLETON: Look, thank you very much everyone for coming here today. We stand in front of Royal Brisbane Hospital, a place that we've stood a couple of times in this campaign. We launched our Public Hospital Report Card here a few weeks ago to highlight how well Queensland had done compared to the rest of Australia.

In fact, the Emergency Department of Royal Brisbane Hospital, the hospital just behind us, is one of the better performing Emergency Departments, and it was appropriate that we highlight that. But that was a time when we were in serious disagreement with the State Government. We had contracts on the table that really were one-sided, that would have allowed unscrupulous managers to interfere and impact on the safe, clinical care of Queenslanders. And it's something that the doctors all decided that they couldn't tolerate.

There was certainly a large amount of unhappiness. A lot of doctors indicated that they were so seriously concerned about the situation that they were actually prepared to resign. I went up and down Queensland and talked to my colleagues and realised that this was a very, very big problem that needed to be solved. We needed to actually do three things.

We needed to make sure we had balanced contracts, and we needed to make sure that those contracts couldn't be changed by a third party without reference to the person in the contract, and we needed to have a mechanism to interface with the government really to make sure this could never happen again. Now, we find ourselves a few weeks down the track and, with intervention of the Director General and the Health Minister, we've actually substantially delivered on those requests that we were after.

So, we actually ended up initially getting an addendum to the contract to try and reverse some of those unfair clauses. And the doctors really weren't happy with that. The lawyers were telling us look, the sensible thing is to wrap this addendum into the contract. So the Minister once again intervened and said, ‘Alright, we were going to do this a year later, we'll do this right now. We'll wrap this addendum into the contract, we'll make sure the intent is delivered in the contract to balance that contract up, to make sure that people weren't actually able to be moved without agreement. That their roster can't be changed without agreement. They can't be unfairly dismissed and there is a dispute resolution clause now wrapped into the contract.’

So, we're actually in a position to say that the contracts are in a far better position for the doctors to consider signing and to move on. The second thing we asked for was to prevent third parties from being able to interfere and change any and all clauses in the contract, and the Minister and the Government put through the Health and Hospital Boards Act, which prevents the Director General from making changes unless they're beneficial to the doctors within the contract. So, that delivered on the second thing.

The third thing was the Contracts Advisory Committee which the Government has put together to allow representatives of doctors to engage with Government, to interface with Government on all issues in relation to the contract, to see if they can further provide that advice from doctors about how to make improvements, how to re-engage doctors into the system. A significant amount of trust has been lost…?

DR STEVE HAMBLETON: Really, I guess I gave a summary of where we came from, and that is we started with a very different place with contracts we believed were unfair, that would have allowed unscrupulous managers to overrule clinical decisions. That was really unacceptable. There was also an ability for a third party to change the contracts without reference to the person in the contract, which was really unacceptable, and the third thing we asked for was a mechanism to engage with government so this should never happen again. And certainly those three things we delivered, so I guess, I just framed how we got here in the first place. There'll be a transcript available too.

QUESTION: And the mass resignations definitely off the table, that's it?

DR STEVE HAMBLETON: The vote last night was that the majority of individuals felt that the mass resignation strategy was no longer required. We had a substantial improvement in the contract. It wasn't perfect. We'd certainly say it's satisfactory, though. We have a mechanism to continually improve it, which we'll seize upon and work together with, and we have an unprecedented unity in this State. All doctors, visiting medical officers, senior medical officers with the Pineapple group, which reformed after a decade, the senior medical officer task force, the Together union, ASMOF federally, ASMOF Queensland, AMA Queensland, and federal AMA, the whole lot of us are of one mind about putting this back together.

17 April 2014

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