Dunedin Hospital junior doctors are ''hesitant'' about taking strike action, but in the long run it should make the health system safer for patients, medical registrar Dr Tim Lequeux says.
Dr Lequeux is one of thousands of resident medical officers around the country on strike for safe working hours. The 48-hour strike ends tomorrow at 7am.
Dr Lequeux said he had made mistakes because of fatigue, but managed to catch them before patient harm could occur. Sometimes it meant ringing up the hospital late at night from home.
Some Dunedin Hospital junior doctors worked ''very dangerous rosters''.
He said his own roster was not unsafe. ''I sometimes work 12 days in a row, but when we have that shift we only have one long day [13 hours] within the 12 days.
''One of our 12 days is really just coming in for a couple of hours to hand over, so we're not really in the same boat as the other 12-day stretches.''
Unsafe rosters often contained three long days in a full 12-day roster.
''People are pretty disappointed that it's got to this stage. Everyone's pretty hesitant about going on strike and would rather the issues just got sorted with reasonable discussion.''
The disruption was worthwhile because the aim was to make the system safer, he said.
'''We feel it's more unsafe to keep going the way we're going than to delay a few operations. It will certainly be inconvenient for quite a substantial number of people,'' Dr Lequeux said.
Yesterday, the Southern District Health Board said its contingency planning had been effective.
''Our Dunedin, Wakari, and Invercargill hospitals are doing an outstanding job of focusing on urgent and acute care and, as much as possible, it is business as usual,'' interim chief executive Chris Fleming said.
About 500 outpatient clinics and elective surgeries had had to be postponed at SDHB. Of the board's 269 junior doctors, 73% were members of the union, the New Zealand Resident Doctors' Association.
The board said it had still not confirmed how many of them were on strike.
