- In short: The Federal Court is forcing a Victorian health service to pay a young doctor Gaby Bolton her unpaid overtime.
- What’s next? Lawyers say Dr Bolton’s win paves the legal path for up to 25,000 junior doctors in Victoria to claim wage theft worth totalling $250 million
A Melbourne hospital could be forced to pay more than 1500 junior doctors for overtime following an historic class action win over wage theft.
A Federal Court judge has found Peninsula Health breached the Fair Work Act in underpaying its junior doctors between 2015 and 2021.
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 remaining junior doctors are yet to have their individual claims, ranging between $5,000 and $50,000, assessed.
Dr Bolton, now an aesthetic registrar at a different hospital, started her career at Frankston Hospital in Melbourne’s south-east and 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.
Before she went into medicine, Dr Bolton knew overtime was part of being a doctor, and like many trainees initially did not want to make a fuss by complaining.
“Us junior doctors just put our head down and do the work because at the end of the day we do it for our patients,” she said.
She was approached by lawyers for Australian Salaried Medical Officers’ Federation to put her name to the class action and agreed.
Court case centred on how overtime was authorised
The central issue in Gaby Bolton’s case, launched in 2021 and finalised on Friday against Peninsula Health, 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 overtime was authorised by implication, because of the tasks she was expected to complete before leaving work.
Dr Bolton gave evidence she was expected to start her shift before the rostered time because she was expected to prepare patient lists for a handover meeting, which she could only do by coming in early. She often stayed at work past her finish time until ward rounds or medical records were completed.
She gave evidence that the method of claiming overtime — via phone to her superior — was difficult.
“You would be questioned as to why you needed the overtime, why these tasks were necessary, why couldn’t they be handed over, why couldn’t they be done in your rostered hours, and why couldn’t you just wait to do it the next day,” Dr Bolton told the court.
Such a phone call “may have made her look like a lazy and inefficient doctor”, court documents showed.
Dr Bolton’s landmark win to impact thousands of other young doctors
Class action lawyers say the ruling in Dr Bolton’s favour paves the way for other class actions in progress against other Victorian health services, likely to result in 25,000 junior doctors receiving $10,000 each.
Lawyer Hayden Stephens said there had been a long-running campaign to stop excessive, dangerous overtime.
He praised Dr Bolton for standing up to her former employer.
“She’s shown great courage in taking on Peninsula Health,” Mr Stephens said.
Gordon Legal partner Andrew Grech, who is also acting the class action, said Justice Mordecai Bromberg’s decision would “likely govern the rights and entitlements of thousands of junior doctors”.
He called on the Victorian government to intervene.
“You can’t trust the CEOs of the health services to honour the spirit of the wage theft legislation,” Mr Grech said.
“It’s time to stop stealing the wages of junior doctors and start treating them with the respect they deserve.”
A state government spokesperson said the government takes its health workforce seriously and “wage theft is not tolerated in Victoria”.
Other health services subject to class actions over unpaid overtime to junior doctors are Monash Health, Latrobe Regional Hospital and Bairnsdale Regional, Western Health, Eastern Health and the Royal Womens’, Alfred Health and St Vincent’s Hospital, Northern Health, Bendigo Health and Melbourne Health and Northeast Health Wangaratta.