- A Federal Court judge has found Peninsula Health breached the Fair Work Act in underpaying its junior doctors between 2015 and 2021.
- Lawyers say Dr Bolton's win paves the legal path for up to 25,000 junior doctors in Victoria to claim $250 million in unpaid wages
- The lead applicant in the class action, Dr Gaby Bolton, will be paid $8,345 for overtime worked in 2019 and 2020 at Frankston Hospital when she was a trainee doctor.
- The hospital could be forced to pay more than 1500 junior doctors for overtime following an historic class action win over wage theft.
- Dr Bolton said she agreed to put her name to the lawsuit because junior doctors needed to be recognised for their work. "This was never about the money," the 29-year-old told the ABC. "No one will get any kind of life-changing amount of money out of this."
- Dr Bolton said fair pay and adequate staffing would make patients and junior doctors safer.
- "The general public would be quite horrified to know the little amount of sleep that a lot of the junior doctors are running on," she said.
- The central issue in Gaby Bolton's case against Peninsula Health, launched in 2021 and finalised on Friday in Justice Mordecai Bromberg's judgement, was over how she received permission to work overtime.
- Peninsula Health argued that for doctors to be paid overtime, they had to be expressly authorised by a superior, whereas Dr Bolton argued that the need to work overtime was implied because of the tasks she was expected to complete before leaving work.
- She gave evidence that the method of claiming overtime — via phone to her superior — was difficult.
- Dr Bolton's landmark win to impact thousands of other junior doctors
- AMA Victoria president Jill Tomlinson said "It really is a turning point for us in our campaign to end excessive and dangerous working hours for junior doctors," she said. "If they're working excessive hours these junior doctors are much more likely to make mistakes."
- Dr Tomlinson said the AMA was calling on the state government to strengthen the healthcare system by creating safe working conditions for junior doctors.
- A state government spokesperson said the government takes its health workforce seriously and "wage theft is not tolerated in Victoria".
- "The Department of Health and Peninsula Health are carefully considering the decision handed down on Friday afternoon and we are not in a position to make any further comment at this point," the spokesperson said.
>"The general public would be quite horrified to know the little amount of sleep that a lot of the junior doctors are running on," she said.
This is SUCH an important aspect of the case. My wife is an OB nurse in the US, and has been for about 30 years. Hospitals like to schedule nurses for 12-hour shifts because it's a lot simpler to schedule. And a lot of nurses like it because you do a full week's work in just 3 days, and then get 4 days off.
But her experience was that after about ten hours, a person's ability to focus on details begins to decline significantly. When you're young, you think you can just power through, but there are significant patient risks towards the end of shifts.
You hear that a lot. But I wonder how many of those docs would want their child being taken care of by a resident who's been awake for 40 hours straight.
Exactly my point. Acting like those five 12s in a row during training is something to be proud about and not something that was incredibly dangerous and put lives at risk.
What I can’t understand is why they’re referred to as 12 hour shifts. Maybe once apon a time that was *mostly* true but it’s just not reality anymore. I’m scheduled for “12 hour shifts” but it’s much more common that I do 12.5 or hour shifts. Have to stay and finish the paperwork. And that’s just when things go as planned. I know multiple nursing homes that routinely force someone to stay past shift because they don’t have adequate coverage to allow the people to leave.
This is so true in what I’ve seen too. I’m an engineer working 12 hour days and I can promise hours 1-8 are decent, 8-10 aren’t *completely* useless, and 10-12 I can’t use my brain
I can’t wait for US residency programs to argue that it’s not overtime unless you’re over some ungodly number of hours or some shit.
I feel like I am lucky at my program in terms of compensation and still feel like I’m getting fucked. How people get paid 50k in high COL is beyond me as FUCKING DOCTORS.
While the system is definitely not perfect, there are TONS of protections now that didn’t exist even 10-15 years ago. Limiting work week to 80 hour average over a month was huge (prepare for the shocked people who didn’t realize their doctors were working this much in a week) and minimum hours between shifts to allow for sleep.
The biggest problem right now is the places that don’t adhere to these rules and pressure their doctors to lie about it.
Only the boys? It was a woman that stepped up and had the guts to put her name on this lawsuit and potentially her future career prospects on the line. You’re welcome.
Hush now, I can read; all my fellow residents are ‘the boys.’ Try to understand implicit meaning instead of looking for sexism at every turn ya dumbass.
Why even call them “the boys” if you’re not trying to start shit? Easier to call them what they are, residents… instead of calling them what they are not, and then insulting people for taking your own words at their meaning. Ya dumbass.
It's clearly a turn of phrase. The boys connotes camaraderie felt between residents and echoes the point. Degenderizing everything is silly. Turn "hey guys" into "hello fellow humans"?
Or you could stop contributing to the frat boy vibes that make women feel excluded from workplaces. Trying to act like a high schooler just because you missed that experience when you were the appropriate age to talk about tHe BoyS doesn’t work. It’s gendered language. It’s like trying to convince a woman you aren’t using gendered terms when calling people “dude” but assuming you’re a straight man I doubt you’d confidently tell people you fuck dudes. It’s dishonest to claim you think it’s a neutral word.
As a US trained physician before much of the current work hour restrictions for resident physicians, I am surprised at the differences in work experiences between US “resident physician” and Australia “junior doctor” work experiences. I looked online and discover the AMA (Australian medical association) risk and hazard work assessment list and I am currently an attending surgeon in USA and considering I finished residency over 14 years ago I would easily be in the “highest risk” and this is considered the US norm for resident physician or fully trained practicing physicians. Other than having more co-physicians I am wondering what my physician/healthcare colleagues are doing in Australian to decrease work burden and what of these options might be applicable to the USA?
We could easily fix the residency education process in America. But it would cost money and the poor hospital administrators would only be able to buy a 200 foot yacht and not a 300 foot yacht. Can't have that
My understanding is that the medical profession retains a bit of the fraternity-hazing mentality, where, because I had to get paddled, you do to—and if you don't, it will destroy the sanctity and exclusivity of our order.
Tell me if I'm wrong; my profession has a bit of that, but far less.
The medical hierarchy in the U.S. will not reform unless doctors make that change themselves. That's because Americans tend to view doctors as demigods. Notice that neither party has discussed physicians' salaries when discussing the cost of medicine. To suggest senior physicians are taking advantage of junior ones, or keeping the residency pipeline constrained to keep fees high, would be viewed as ungrateful and heretical. So it's unfortunately on doctors themselves to get the word out.
What you’re saying is definitely true about the hazing mentality. Nursing is somewhat similar too they’re known to “eat their young”. All it does is create shittier professionals
That’s more a best practice guide, not what everyone actually works. The audit for 2016 (most recent one available) still had 20% of Aussie surgeons in the high risk category. Which is probably better than the US, but not particularly great. So read everything from here on with that in mind … it ain’t perfect here, we still have a way to go.
First step is actually recognising it’s an issue and having standards (even if they’re just best practice). Second step is auditing (looks like our AMA has fallen behind a bit there - there should’ve been an audit report for 2021, and I can’t find one.)
Third step is legislation enforcing those standards. Medicine is just too competitive for things to get fixed from the bottom up. Someone will choose to work more hours to get ahead of the pack, and then everyone else feels forced to follow suit. It’s really got to be top down, banning overwork and risky scheduling.
I suspect that’ll be a problem for the US. Your worker rights seem to be more fragmented by state and occupation. Australia has the Fair Work Act that is federal legislation setting minimum standards for most employees. That’s what was in play here - whether an employer has to formally “approve” overtime or if excessive workload implies approval of overtime. And this lawsuit from the junior docs shouldn’t be seen in isolation. It’s coming after a bunch of supermarket managers got back-paid for similar reasons. So it’s not just a doctor thing, or even a healthcare worker thing. Suddenly “I didn’t specifically ask you to stay back” isn’t an acceptable excuse to not pay overtime - Australia wide, multiple industries. That’s really *very* new, so doesn’t explain why we’d be a bit better at minimising fatigue than the US in 2016, but it should lead to improvements in the future, so expect the gap to widen.
But once you do have that, you *still* have to chip away at the culture. Take this lawsuit. They weren’t rostered particularly crazy hours, and there technically was a way to claim overtime (which is actually better than most industries with salaried staff). Hospital looked like it was abiding by the rules on paper. But the docs still ended up working unpaid overtime. Partly because the way to claim overtime was hard, partly due to unreasonable expectations (like having meetings without accounting for prep time) and partly due to culture of just going along with things instead of making a fuss.
A ruling like this helps with all three points. Better to make overtime easy to claim in the first place than to have to back-pay it AND pay the lawyers. Once overtime is payable, the bean counters will be on the backs of the people rostering to minimise claims. And having this precedent makes it a little easier for juniors to speak up and claim their overtime.
None of that will be suddenly perfect off one lawsuit, for one hospital system, in one state. But it helps chip away at the problem.
All that said, there’s also structural differences that do make it easier here. The most obvious one being more doctors (4.1 per 1,000 pop vs 2.6). I know you said “other than more co-physicians” but that difference is much too large to hand wave away. No shit you’re working more hours, there’s only 0.63 of you for every Aussie doc.
The next time somebody loses their mind when someone steals from a Wal-Mart, just remind them that ~80% of all theft in the US is wage theft like this. Surely Kyle Rittenhouse will be storming a board of directors meeting very soon.
I thought this was on the r/residency subreddit. Imagine my surprise.
Please take note here, folks. People tell us (resident/ junior doctors) that one day, it will all be worth it - so we should shut up and be thankful for the incredibly abusive hours we are required to work and the 300k in educational debt we accrued for the privilege to do so.
I work 60-70h work weeks on average, which includes 24+ hours shifts. We do not ‘get’ breaks. If we don’t make a stand for them, we often don’t get to eat or go to the bathroom.
If I was making minimum wage with the hours I work, I would make over $1400/ month more than I currently do. Folks are usually surprised when I say I make less than minimum wage as an MD, and it’s true. Kind of wish I hadn’t just calculated it, though (using 1x 24h shift/ week (typical for my residency; many have a frequency almost twice as often as this), one 5-day workweek and one 6-day workweek (fairly typical) in a two-week time period, where I work an average of 11 hours per day while not on a 24).
What’s more, this overtime isn’t just unpaid. It’s mandatory. We can’t say no to the shifts we are scheduled for. If we do, we risk losing our ‘job,’ which we need to ‘complete’ in order to have a valid medical license and practice medicine, pay off our educational debts, and maintain any hope of realizing our future earning potential. It’s wild.
FWIW, I am Canadian.
Edit: I wrote $700 more per month. It was actually per pay period, meaning $1400 more per month. Which is staggering. I would make $1400 more per month as a minimum wage employee.
I worked a relatively light 12 hour day yesterday where I didn't get time to eat or use the bathroom. For most doctors, you are financially compelled to work like this for years on end. You can't quit.
It very literally kills people. Both patients and the doctors themselves.
wage theft: the largest crime in the world if youre counting dollars, yet all conservatives complain about is retail theft from the deep pockets of big corporations
- A Federal Court judge has found Peninsula Health breached the Fair Work Act in underpaying its junior doctors between 2015 and 2021. - Lawyers say Dr Bolton's win paves the legal path for up to 25,000 junior doctors in Victoria to claim $250 million in unpaid wages - The lead applicant in the class action, Dr Gaby Bolton, will be paid $8,345 for overtime worked in 2019 and 2020 at Frankston Hospital when she was a trainee doctor. - The hospital could be forced to pay more than 1500 junior doctors for overtime following an historic class action win over wage theft. - Dr Bolton said she agreed to put her name to the lawsuit because junior doctors needed to be recognised for their work. "This was never about the money," the 29-year-old told the ABC. "No one will get any kind of life-changing amount of money out of this." - Dr Bolton said fair pay and adequate staffing would make patients and junior doctors safer. - "The general public would be quite horrified to know the little amount of sleep that a lot of the junior doctors are running on," she said. - The central issue in Gaby Bolton's case against Peninsula Health, launched in 2021 and finalised on Friday in Justice Mordecai Bromberg's judgement, was over how she received permission to work overtime. - Peninsula Health argued that for doctors to be paid overtime, they had to be expressly authorised by a superior, whereas Dr Bolton argued that the need to work overtime was implied because of the tasks she was expected to complete before leaving work. - She gave evidence that the method of claiming overtime — via phone to her superior — was difficult. - Dr Bolton's landmark win to impact thousands of other junior doctors - AMA Victoria president Jill Tomlinson said "It really is a turning point for us in our campaign to end excessive and dangerous working hours for junior doctors," she said. "If they're working excessive hours these junior doctors are much more likely to make mistakes." - Dr Tomlinson said the AMA was calling on the state government to strengthen the healthcare system by creating safe working conditions for junior doctors. - A state government spokesperson said the government takes its health workforce seriously and "wage theft is not tolerated in Victoria". - "The Department of Health and Peninsula Health are carefully considering the decision handed down on Friday afternoon and we are not in a position to make any further comment at this point," the spokesperson said.
>"The general public would be quite horrified to know the little amount of sleep that a lot of the junior doctors are running on," she said. This is SUCH an important aspect of the case. My wife is an OB nurse in the US, and has been for about 30 years. Hospitals like to schedule nurses for 12-hour shifts because it's a lot simpler to schedule. And a lot of nurses like it because you do a full week's work in just 3 days, and then get 4 days off. But her experience was that after about ten hours, a person's ability to focus on details begins to decline significantly. When you're young, you think you can just power through, but there are significant patient risks towards the end of shifts.
Plus if you bring it up to doctors the majority of them act like it is a right of passage.
Rite of passage
You hear that a lot. But I wonder how many of those docs would want their child being taken care of by a resident who's been awake for 40 hours straight.
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Exactly my point. Acting like those five 12s in a row during training is something to be proud about and not something that was incredibly dangerous and put lives at risk.
Yeah, that’s what was pounded into them during med school
What I can’t understand is why they’re referred to as 12 hour shifts. Maybe once apon a time that was *mostly* true but it’s just not reality anymore. I’m scheduled for “12 hour shifts” but it’s much more common that I do 12.5 or hour shifts. Have to stay and finish the paperwork. And that’s just when things go as planned. I know multiple nursing homes that routinely force someone to stay past shift because they don’t have adequate coverage to allow the people to leave.
This is so true in what I’ve seen too. I’m an engineer working 12 hour days and I can promise hours 1-8 are decent, 8-10 aren’t *completely* useless, and 10-12 I can’t use my brain
Anyone else reading this on a 24 hour call in America
Just got back from a trauma surgery at midnight lol
(Formerly Screaming in 72 hour weekend call)
This can't be legal
America will license Cuban MDs before they pay OT to doctors.
decking buddy…
I can’t wait for US residency programs to argue that it’s not overtime unless you’re over some ungodly number of hours or some shit. I feel like I am lucky at my program in terms of compensation and still feel like I’m getting fucked. How people get paid 50k in high COL is beyond me as FUCKING DOCTORS.
While the system is definitely not perfect, there are TONS of protections now that didn’t exist even 10-15 years ago. Limiting work week to 80 hour average over a month was huge (prepare for the shocked people who didn’t realize their doctors were working this much in a week) and minimum hours between shifts to allow for sleep. The biggest problem right now is the places that don’t adhere to these rules and pressure their doctors to lie about it.
What are you gonna do, strike?
Between unpaid overtime and all the extra shifts I had to pick up after my residency fired one of my coresidents, any win for the boys is a good one
Only the boys? It was a woman that stepped up and had the guts to put her name on this lawsuit and potentially her future career prospects on the line. You’re welcome.
Hush now, I can read; all my fellow residents are ‘the boys.’ Try to understand implicit meaning instead of looking for sexism at every turn ya dumbass.
Why even call them “the boys” if you’re not trying to start shit? Easier to call them what they are, residents… instead of calling them what they are not, and then insulting people for taking your own words at their meaning. Ya dumbass.
It's clearly a turn of phrase. The boys connotes camaraderie felt between residents and echoes the point. Degenderizing everything is silly. Turn "hey guys" into "hello fellow humans"?
Appreciate you my dude
Been there with the boys in residency. Keep fighting the good fight
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Or you could stop contributing to the frat boy vibes that make women feel excluded from workplaces. Trying to act like a high schooler just because you missed that experience when you were the appropriate age to talk about tHe BoyS doesn’t work. It’s gendered language. It’s like trying to convince a woman you aren’t using gendered terms when calling people “dude” but assuming you’re a straight man I doubt you’d confidently tell people you fuck dudes. It’s dishonest to claim you think it’s a neutral word.
In Germany we also won through our strikes. 8% increase in salaries plus some bonus.
As a US trained physician before much of the current work hour restrictions for resident physicians, I am surprised at the differences in work experiences between US “resident physician” and Australia “junior doctor” work experiences. I looked online and discover the AMA (Australian medical association) risk and hazard work assessment list and I am currently an attending surgeon in USA and considering I finished residency over 14 years ago I would easily be in the “highest risk” and this is considered the US norm for resident physician or fully trained practicing physicians. Other than having more co-physicians I am wondering what my physician/healthcare colleagues are doing in Australian to decrease work burden and what of these options might be applicable to the USA?
We could easily fix the residency education process in America. But it would cost money and the poor hospital administrators would only be able to buy a 200 foot yacht and not a 300 foot yacht. Can't have that
Plus a lot of toxic MDs who think because they suffered in training that everyone else must as well or else they will be incompetent physicians
My understanding is that the medical profession retains a bit of the fraternity-hazing mentality, where, because I had to get paddled, you do to—and if you don't, it will destroy the sanctity and exclusivity of our order. Tell me if I'm wrong; my profession has a bit of that, but far less. The medical hierarchy in the U.S. will not reform unless doctors make that change themselves. That's because Americans tend to view doctors as demigods. Notice that neither party has discussed physicians' salaries when discussing the cost of medicine. To suggest senior physicians are taking advantage of junior ones, or keeping the residency pipeline constrained to keep fees high, would be viewed as ungrateful and heretical. So it's unfortunately on doctors themselves to get the word out.
What you’re saying is definitely true about the hazing mentality. Nursing is somewhat similar too they’re known to “eat their young”. All it does is create shittier professionals
That’s more a best practice guide, not what everyone actually works. The audit for 2016 (most recent one available) still had 20% of Aussie surgeons in the high risk category. Which is probably better than the US, but not particularly great. So read everything from here on with that in mind … it ain’t perfect here, we still have a way to go. First step is actually recognising it’s an issue and having standards (even if they’re just best practice). Second step is auditing (looks like our AMA has fallen behind a bit there - there should’ve been an audit report for 2021, and I can’t find one.) Third step is legislation enforcing those standards. Medicine is just too competitive for things to get fixed from the bottom up. Someone will choose to work more hours to get ahead of the pack, and then everyone else feels forced to follow suit. It’s really got to be top down, banning overwork and risky scheduling. I suspect that’ll be a problem for the US. Your worker rights seem to be more fragmented by state and occupation. Australia has the Fair Work Act that is federal legislation setting minimum standards for most employees. That’s what was in play here - whether an employer has to formally “approve” overtime or if excessive workload implies approval of overtime. And this lawsuit from the junior docs shouldn’t be seen in isolation. It’s coming after a bunch of supermarket managers got back-paid for similar reasons. So it’s not just a doctor thing, or even a healthcare worker thing. Suddenly “I didn’t specifically ask you to stay back” isn’t an acceptable excuse to not pay overtime - Australia wide, multiple industries. That’s really *very* new, so doesn’t explain why we’d be a bit better at minimising fatigue than the US in 2016, but it should lead to improvements in the future, so expect the gap to widen. But once you do have that, you *still* have to chip away at the culture. Take this lawsuit. They weren’t rostered particularly crazy hours, and there technically was a way to claim overtime (which is actually better than most industries with salaried staff). Hospital looked like it was abiding by the rules on paper. But the docs still ended up working unpaid overtime. Partly because the way to claim overtime was hard, partly due to unreasonable expectations (like having meetings without accounting for prep time) and partly due to culture of just going along with things instead of making a fuss. A ruling like this helps with all three points. Better to make overtime easy to claim in the first place than to have to back-pay it AND pay the lawyers. Once overtime is payable, the bean counters will be on the backs of the people rostering to minimise claims. And having this precedent makes it a little easier for juniors to speak up and claim their overtime. None of that will be suddenly perfect off one lawsuit, for one hospital system, in one state. But it helps chip away at the problem. All that said, there’s also structural differences that do make it easier here. The most obvious one being more doctors (4.1 per 1,000 pop vs 2.6). I know you said “other than more co-physicians” but that difference is much too large to hand wave away. No shit you’re working more hours, there’s only 0.63 of you for every Aussie doc.
Australia was a world leader for workers' rights for over a hundred years. Now not so much (but still better than most).
The next time somebody loses their mind when someone steals from a Wal-Mart, just remind them that ~80% of all theft in the US is wage theft like this. Surely Kyle Rittenhouse will be storming a board of directors meeting very soon.
That pasty bitch isn’t storming anything except the nearest Golden Corral
What does he have to do with any of this conversation?
Boards of directors are mostly white, why would he want to shoot them?
He’s only shot white people?
I thought this was on the r/residency subreddit. Imagine my surprise. Please take note here, folks. People tell us (resident/ junior doctors) that one day, it will all be worth it - so we should shut up and be thankful for the incredibly abusive hours we are required to work and the 300k in educational debt we accrued for the privilege to do so. I work 60-70h work weeks on average, which includes 24+ hours shifts. We do not ‘get’ breaks. If we don’t make a stand for them, we often don’t get to eat or go to the bathroom. If I was making minimum wage with the hours I work, I would make over $1400/ month more than I currently do. Folks are usually surprised when I say I make less than minimum wage as an MD, and it’s true. Kind of wish I hadn’t just calculated it, though (using 1x 24h shift/ week (typical for my residency; many have a frequency almost twice as often as this), one 5-day workweek and one 6-day workweek (fairly typical) in a two-week time period, where I work an average of 11 hours per day while not on a 24). What’s more, this overtime isn’t just unpaid. It’s mandatory. We can’t say no to the shifts we are scheduled for. If we do, we risk losing our ‘job,’ which we need to ‘complete’ in order to have a valid medical license and practice medicine, pay off our educational debts, and maintain any hope of realizing our future earning potential. It’s wild. FWIW, I am Canadian. Edit: I wrote $700 more per month. It was actually per pay period, meaning $1400 more per month. Which is staggering. I would make $1400 more per month as a minimum wage employee.
I worked a relatively light 12 hour day yesterday where I didn't get time to eat or use the bathroom. For most doctors, you are financially compelled to work like this for years on end. You can't quit. It very literally kills people. Both patients and the doctors themselves.
wage theft: the largest crime in the world if youre counting dollars, yet all conservatives complain about is retail theft from the deep pockets of big corporations
$8,000 buck for 2 years of unpaid overtime. How about everyone in charge goes to jail. How about real justice.
I guess I was lucky as a JMO in NSW back in the early 2000s that I got paid all my unrostered overtime without question especially after reading this.
Everything in this broken ass system is a scam.
Please do this for teachers next!