Doctors ordered to call off three-day strike in latest pay dispute (2025)

Thousands of doctors have been ordered to call off a planned three-day strike after the NSW government launched a last-minute court bid to prevent further mass disruption to the state’s public health system.

NSW Health and the Australian Salaried Medical Officers’ Federation (ASMOF NSW) were called before the Industrial Relations Commission on Tuesday morning in an attempt to broker a deal after the doctors’ union rejected two “insulting” pay offers.

The two parties could not agree on a final pay offer in the conciliation presided over by IRC Acting Justice Peter Kite.

The commission instead ordered the union and its members to abandon the planned strike and refrain from taking industrial action for the next three months, a spokesman for NSW Health confirmed.

The union must remove any reference to the strike action from its website and social media accounts and publish the orders directly in a prominent position on their website.

ASMOF NSW was approached for comment.

Doctors would face the risk of heavy fines if they defied the orders.

Sydney’s Royal Prince Alfred, Westmead Children’s, Nepean, Hornsby and Wollongong are among the hospitals where doctors had voted to strike.

A staff specialist doctor at Westmead Hospital, not authorised to speak publicly, said at least 100 colleagues at the hospital planned to walk off the job, affecting specialties including surgery, anaesthetics and emergency.

Similarly to the nurse and midwife strikes last year, essential services would be maintained but elective procedures, clinics and appointments would need to be cancelled or postponed, the doctor said.

NSW Health employs about 16,000 full-time equivalent doctors. ASMOF said it has more than 9000 members.

The average salary for senior medical officers is $222,017, according to NSW Health data for the last financial year.

Junior medical officers, who make up around 11,000 of the 16,000 medical positions in NSW, make as little as $78,000 or $38 an hour. That is $5000 less than Victoria and WA, and $12,000 less than their equivalents in Queensland.

ASMOF is demanding a pay rise of up to 30 per cent to match wages in other states. Other demands include enforceable safe working hours to protect patient and staff safety, penalty rates for working unsociable hours, and leave entitlements “that promote work-life balance and fatigue management”.

The union is also lobbying the government to employ more doctors permanently and limit fixed-term contracts to “genuine short-term needs only”.

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The cost of medical locums has doubled in the past five years, and NSW Health spends $270 million every year on short-term doctors (about 1.5 per cent of its total wage bill).

The threatened strike follows more than a year of negotiations and is the latest industrial dispute gripping the state’s health system since Premier Chris Minns lifted the wages cap in 2023.

Paramedics won a 25 per cent pay bump in 2023 after threatening to withdraw their registration on New Year’s Eve, while nurses are yet to secure an improved pay offer despite three major statewide strikes last year.

The union and state government are due to return to the industrial court on Friday to deliver their closing submissions on a separate deal for psychiatrists who threatened mass resignation in their pay dispute.

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