NSW psychiatrists threatening to resign say it’s not about money - it’s about the ‘collapse’ of the system
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Psychiatrists say higher salaries needed to retain doctors and attract new ones to care for mental health patients. When Dr James Leeder goes to work as a psychiatry registrar in North Sydney he sees some of the most challenging patients in medicine – sometimes in a single night – “horrific acts of self harm, hopelessness, people in the throes of psychosis, those who may be deeply substance affected and may be agitated and aggressive”.
![[Natasha May]](https://i.guim.co.uk/img/uploads/2024/11/22/Natasha_May.png?width=75&dpr=1&s=none&crop=none)
“This is a hard job done by people who want to help,” he says. However, he sees the toll it is taking on his colleagues when – amid a workforce crisis where one in three psychiatrist positions in the state are vacant – they provide care for double the number of patients they are meant to.
“When you are not physically able to provide the care that you know from your training and from the evidence is best for those patients – that hurts. That’s what moral injury is. The system is forcing us to compromise in ways that we do not want to,” Leeder says.
“I have watched [others] suffer from this burden, and I do not want to suffer it myself.”. As a trainee, he is not one of the more than 200 psychiatrists in the NSW public system threatening to resign next week, but he attended a press conference this week held by the doctor’s union – the Australian Salaried Medical Officers’ Federation (Asmof) – in support of the action. This is “not just a staff specialist pay dispute, this is about saving the future of the mental health service in New South Wales,” he says.
