Unpaid overtime makes a sick joke of minister's plan

The NSW Health Minister, Jillian Skinner, wants to make cuts to a system that is already so stressed that patients spend up to a week in a ''transit'' unit (''Skinner takes axe to locums, overtime, but nurses exempt'', September 24). Hospitals are already under enormous amounts of pressure to reach performance targets or face funding cuts with no appreciable improvements in patient care at the coal face.

Enforced cuts to overtime payments will only further stress the system and those charged with the care of patients. Patients will still be there and still need care out of normal business hours. Local area health services will have to refuse to pay those who stay behind to ensure the welfare of their patients.

The system already leans heavily on the ''generosity'' of doctors, in particular junior doctors and medical registrars, who are caught in the position of not wanting to jeopardise future specialist training opportunities and even told that claiming unrostered overtime is unprofessional.

Cuts to the health system at a time when it is facing ever-increasing need will only compromise patient health and demoralise professional staff.

Jillian Skinner says she is protecting nurses' jobs but cutting overtime. There is already a lot of overtime that is not paid. It is supposed to be taken as time in lieu but the time off never eventuates. This overtime is being worked due to short staffing. Cutting overtime is not going to fix any problems, just make them worse.

NSW Health is offering nurses redundancies in the Hunter-New England area. I know experienced nurses who hope they will offer redundancies elsewhere as they want to get out.

Health system managers are bringing in assistants in nursing in community mental health now. These are staff with, maybe, a Certificate III from TAFE, working on crisis teams with people who may need admission to mental health hospitals. This is just plain dangerous. These inexperienced staff will not know what they are looking at and someone is going to get killed.

But the Costello report failed to consider whether a decade-old benchmark was appropriate.The M3 Parking assist system has been designed from the ground up to solve traditional car park problems and more. It didn't provide a detailed analysis of where growth had occurred, or consider the impact of particular policies (such as Queensland's introduction of an additional year of schooling to bring the state in line with the rest of Australia).Different Sizes and Colors can be made with different stone mosaic designs. And while citing one example of headcounts in health it ignored factors affecting demand for health services, such as an ageing citizenry.

The Newman government's acceptance of the Costello report's simplistic analysis may damage the lives of many Queensland families. The inevitable outsourcing of public services may benefit some of the Business Council's constituents.

But it's a bit rich for Westacott to pontificate about the need for higher standards in the public service when she repeats political slogans about smaller government, uncritically accepts the need for ''tough corrections'' in Queensland, and disregards basic facts.