As Australian doctors strike for safer working conditions – and are publicly undermined or quietly punished for doing so – I have to ask: who exactly are we keeping safe?
The doctor strikes in New South Wales this week, after the recent mass resignations of the NSW psychiatry workforce, aren’t just localised workforce disputes. They should be seen for what they are – a national red flag waved by those at the coalface of a health system being pushed to the edge – and it should concern every single one of us who might one day need care.
It was only after I saw the dysfunction of the system up close, when a series of operations left me without 90% of my small bowel and fed by a tube, that I began understanding just how deep those system cracks run. I spent six months in hospital, not just watching the system break down around me but watching it break the people trying desperately to hold it together.
A junior doctor stood at my bedside, eyes red, trying to hold herself upright after 16 hours on shift. When I gently asked if she was OK, she wiped the tears from her cheeks with the fierce resolve of someone whose mask had momentarily slipped and replied: “Yes. Thank you. How are your pain levels today?”
I later found out she hadn’t eaten, hadn’t had an opportunity to rest, and had missed her own health appointment that day – scheduled for a time she was supposed to have finished her shift. That was the moment it hit me: the system designed to heal me was harming her.
Through the paper-thin curtains separating the beds on my ward, I started to listen more closely. I heard nurses quietly urged into double shifts. I saw clinicians apologising for delays they had no power to fix. I watched staff stretched too thin, making impossible choices in impossible conditions – bound by a culture that perpetuates the corrosive belief that to practise medicine is to be superhuman.
Becoming a doctor in Australia takes at least a decade of study, internship and specialist training. It often comes with more than $100,000 in student debt, years of delayed earning potential and enormous personal sacrifice that can’t be measured in numbers. To imply these workers are “greedy” or “irresponsible” for seeking safe conditions and pay parity with their interstate colleagues is not just insulting – it’s a deflection from the real crisis, one that isn’t limited to NSW.
We often praise healthcare workers for their commitment and compassion. But rarely do we acknowledge how the system exploits those very qualities. Their empathy. Their sense of duty. Their refusal to walk away when the work gets hard. In a system built on scarcity, these strengths are turned into vulnerabilities – used to keep the whole thing afloat.
That’s why the strikes in NSW matter. Not just to doctors but to people like me. People whose lives depend on this system working properly. Because every symptom of burnout, every unfilled position, every impossibly long shift – it all adds up. And when doctors suffer, patients do too.
This isn’t about politics. It’s about people. And it’s about the basic truth that a healthcare system cannot truly care for its patients unless it also cares for its staff. We cannot build a system on burnout and act surprised when it goes up in smoke.
As someone who has witnessed the consequences of health system failure, I want to say this clearly: I do not want care that comes at the cost of someone else’s health. I do not want safety that is built on someone else’s suffering. I do not want to be healed by someone who is being quietly broken in the process.
The strikes in NSW should concern us all – because they are not an aberration. They’re a warning. Health systems across Australia are facing workforce shortages, chronic under-resourcing, a looming workforce retirement cliff and an ageing population with rising complexity of need.
I stand with the doctors and healthcare workers speaking up. I stand with those walking off the job not out of neglect but because they care too much to keep pretending this is sustainable. I stand with them not as a political act but as a human one.
This isn’t about choosing sides. It’s about choosing care. And care must never come at the cost of the people who provide it.
Not in my name.
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