Ahead of the Victorian state election, medical professionals say patients’ care is being compromised by overwork and understaffing at hospitals
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Despite its challenges, Sarah* loves her job. After a decade working as a doctor, “it still feels like a privilege to do the work I do,” she says. “I do a lot of long hours and unpaid work, and generally accept this as going with the territory.”
While pregnant, Sarah worked night shifts until she was 30 weeks along, and then at 35 weeks worked 10 days in a row, including a 15-hour shift. “I would have worked 120 hours in the fortnight and not got paid overtime.”
The Victorian doctor, who has young children, is one of thousands of medical professionals across the state to have taken part in industrial action in recent months, after more than a year of government negotiations failed to address their concerns about pay and unsafe working conditions.
On 1 October, for the first time in more than 25 years, doctors across Victoria took a four-hour work stoppage. On the steps of state parliament, Australian Salaried Medical Officers Federation (ASMOF) members gathered in the rain, striking for a 30% pay rise over four years, a cap of 12.5 hours on shifts, and a guarantee of three consecutive days off during a fortnight of work.
On the same day, members of the Victorian Allied Health Professionals Association, embroiled in their own – still ongoing – pay dispute with the government, began a 24-hour stop-work action.
The doctors’ strike had come after weeks of localised actions across Melbourne and regional hospitals, but failed to secure a pay deal that members were happy with. A longer strike, scheduled for 21 October, was then cancelled after members narrowly voted to accept a revised 12-month interim offer from the Victorian government.
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In a heated call with about 1,000 doctors days earlier, on 19 October, ASMOF and Australian Medical Association (AMA) executives characterised the offer as “nowhere near close to what we want”, but encouraged doctors to accept the interim deal before government entered caretaker mode ahead of the Victorian election.
It was seen as a capitulation by many doctors, who are frustrated about overwork and understaffing that they say compromises Victoria’s health system. “The conditions for staff and patients in our public hospitals are a problem and won’t be resolved by this deal,” Sarah says.
“The hours we work compromise patient safety,” says a Victorian critical care doctor in training. “It is so unsafe to have one doctor working up to 16 hours a day. You wouldn’t want someone that fatigued flying a plane, or looking after your sick family member.”
Strained public health system
Guardian Australia analysis of dozens of health service annual reports released by the government on 30 October show that in the 2025-26 reporting period, more than 10,000 patients spent over 24 hours in Victorian emergency departments (EDs). Monash Health accounted for the highest number of these patients across its four hospitals (2,501), followed by Albury Wodonga (2,421) and Eastern Health (1,731).
At 16 hospitals, the average ED length of stay for patients who were admitted exceeded 12 hours – a delay that increases the chance of dying in hospital by more than 67%, according to the Australasian College for Emergency Medicine (ACEM).
Patients who are admitted to hospital typically spend twice as long in the ED as those who are discharged home, ACEM has said. “More presentations are requiring hospital admission … yet the number of available hospital beds is decreasing, leading to extended stays in the emergency department.”
Late last month, Ben Carroll announced that a re-elected Labor government would spend $1.5bn to slash emergency wait times by 20%, by expanding EDs at a dozen hospitals and hiring 1,500 workers. But the election pledge was viewed by some as too little, too late for a government seen as accountable for a strained public health system over its 12 years in power.
The Victorian Allied Health Professionals Association criticised the announcement as a “Band-Aid solution” for a “broken healthcare system”.
“Throwing money at ED expansion won’t fix a bed-flow problem that starts with unfilled allied health roles,” it said in a social media post.
Publicly, the AMA and ASMOF welcomed the $1.5bn promise. In a statement, the AMA Victoria president, Dr Simon Judkins, described it as a significant investment, but “only one part of the broader reform needed to fix Victoria’s healthcare system”.
The commitment, though welcome, “does not address access to specialist care or the shortage of available hospital beds, both of which have a major impact on patient flow and the ability of emergency departments to function effectively,” he said.
Privately, frustration is evident. During the 19 October call with doctors, the federal ASMOF president, Dr Roderick McRae, criticised the Victorian government for its treatment of medical professionals, and – according to multiple sources – recommended that instead of voting for Labor, doctors should pay a fine or vote informally.
ASMOF executives subsequently walked back the comments. In a 30 October email apologising to members, it said: “Comments that were of any partisanship [sic] nature were completely inappropriate and ASMOF does not endorse any political party, nor do we wish to influence voter intention.”
Carroll also announced an election pledge to ban violent patients from hospitals for up to 12 months, raising concerns that vulnerable Victorians could be denied healthcare as a result.
Commenting on the policy, Judkins says: “Doctors recognise the growing problem of violence in Victoria’s emergency departments and the urgent need to protect healthcare workers and patients. However, it is equally important that everyone, including people charged with criminal offences, continues to have access to essential healthcare.”
Guardian Australia analysis of the annual reports shows high rates of occupational violence against healthcare workers in 2025–26, up from the previous year. Northern Health logged the most incidents overall – 4,626, at a rate of 73.52 incidents per 100 full-time equivalent staff – followed by Latrobe Regional Health (2,204 incidents, 98.04 per 100 FTE) and Western Health (2,086 incidents, 30.14 per 100 FTE).
Paul Healey, the state secretary of the Health and Community Services Union, says: “There’s a stronger culture of reporting, but the incidents aren’t going down.”
Violent incidents the union’s members report vary from hits, slaps and pushes to more severe. “There’s an example of a staff member who was knocked to the ground, got hit over 20 times to the head, and ended up with facial fractures, [and a] broken collarbone,” Healey says. “There hasn’t been interventions put in place … to make staff feel safe.”
The Liberals, led by Jess Wilson, in August said that if elected they would crack down on escalating violence in hospitals by deploying 70 protective services officers for a two-year pilot at seven major hospitals – but made the announcement without consulting most of the hospitals that would be involved.
“While stronger security measures are welcome, a heavy-handed approach risks escalating situations in a manner that is ultimately detrimental to patient health outcomes and the objectives of medical staff,” Judkins said. “It is preferable that security personnel are appropriately trained.”
A future Liberal government has also pledged to establish SurgerySooner, a $1.27bn plan over four years to halve Victoria’s elective surgery waitlist by giving public patients the choice to undergo surgery at a private hospital. It has also promised $99m for 10 new or expanded patient transit lounges – spaces for patients who are ready to leave hospital but are waiting for discharge arrangements.
‘So much that went wrong’
A coroner’s report published last month on the 2022 death of eight-year-old Amrita Lanka at Monash children’s hospital has outraged doctors, who say the case is emblematic of systemic failures.
The report concluded that the actions of a “relatively junior doctor”, who had been handed over about 18 patients in the ED at the start of the night shift, “caused or contributed to” Lanka’s death from myocarditis, an inflammation of the heart muscle.
It commended Monash Health for an internal review in response to Lanka’s death, which it said “largely obviates the need for formal coronial recommendation”.
A doctor working at Monash Health, who did not wish to be identified, says: “My colleagues are outraged by the lack of findings or recommendations from the coroner regarding Monash Health’s systemic failures.”
“Junior doctors go to work most shifts feeling overworked, under-resourced, and juggling competing priorities that sometimes rely on luck to avoid serious negative outcome. Many of my colleagues feel this could well have been them in the same position.”
Judkins declined to comment on the circumstances of the case, but says AMA Victoria has “serious concerns about the public identification of an individual doctor and, together with ACEM, will raise these concerns directly with the coroner”.
In an email to all Monash Health staff on October 16, its chief executive, Prof Eugine Yafele, said he had contacted the individual doctor to “assure him that he has my full support and confidence”. A Monash spokesperson confirmed that since Lanka’s death, the health service had focused on system-wide issues and improvements to patient care, and was providing support to staff involved.
“It’s so awful what this family has been through,” says the critical care doctor. “There was so much that went wrong that night.”
Junior doctors are often treated as scapegoats and “thrown under the bus in these situations”, he says. “Why is a doctor in training in charge of an emergency department overnight to look after this many patients? How is this considered safe?”
The case, he says, has “brought to light the conditions in which we work and what we’re fighting for. It’s not just about pay – it’s about working conditions, it’s about patient safety.”
*Name has been changed
