Mukesh Haikerwal

From early in his career Haikerwal has advocated for better conditions for medical staff. As a representative of junior doctors in the Southern Trent Region of England, he facilitated a meeting in 1989 with Members of Parliament to discuss concerns about the long hours of work. Haikerwal told the meeting that doctors were commonly working 72 hours a week, or longer, [making]..."life or death decisions when sometimes [they] are too tired to talk properly."[13] The doctors used various publicity stunts to draw public attention to the issues, which Haikerwal described as being mostly the risk to patient safety. He said it was about "changing some practices and organising time better", in the context of Regional Health Authorities guidelines being that "junior doctors should not work more than 104 hours a week, or 48 hour continuously."[14] By June 1990 a move to have a survey on social action for a shorter week was approved by the British Medical Association junior doctors committee,[15] and on 2 July 1990, it was confirmed that authorised surveys would be sent out to all junior doctors in England to discover if they were prepared to take industrial action.[16] Recalling his time at Leicester General Hospital, he later told The Age newspaper: "If you want someone to work hard, pay them properly and give them good conditions. If you've got doctors that are working and happy, they'll do a better job. And the patients will benefit at the end of the day, too."[17]

When a gunman shot and killed a security guard in 2001 after storming into an abortion clinic in Australia, while an anti-abortion group was demonstrating nearby, Haikerwal expressed concern that this reflected growing levels of violence against any medical staff, "whether at hospitals, private clinics or other health-related clinics."[18]

In his role as President of the Australian Medical Association Haikerwal campaigned for improvements in how emotional trauma for young doctors is managed. The suicide of a trainee surgeon in Australia in 2006 highlighted the emotional stresses placed upon doctors and Haikerwal said that a survey of junior doctors on the numbers of hours they worked had not shown much improvement since a survey conducted four years previously. He concluded that "there has to be a reasonable expectation of reasonable life, doing what is doing a very impassioned career, looking after people...[with the promotion of]...a more supportive, nurturing way of looking after all of us within the profession."[19]

Haikerwal is an advocate for the responsible use of digital technologies to manage medical data on behalf of doctors and patients. Between 2007 and 2013 in his role as an eHealth Head of Clinical Leadership and Stakeholder Management on the Australian National E-Health Transition Authority (NEHTA) he had a major role in implementing the Personally Controlled Electronic Health Record System (PCEHR).[20] In 2010 Haikerwal co-authored a paper in the Medical Journal of Australia that critically examined the implementation of e-health in Australia at the time. The authors noted the benefits of the system to patients following government funding and legislation, but identified that due to hospitals generally not being adequately computerized, there was a lack of coordination in securely sharing patient data, [and]..."to ensure the clinical relevance, utility, safety and acceptability of e-health systems, health professionals urgently need technical capacity and expert guidance."[21] When Haikerwal resigned from his position at NEHTA in August 2013, the Australian Medical Association President said it is raised concerns about a lack of consultation with doctors in the PCEHR implementation process, noting that this was "the sort of expertise that Dr Haikerwal and his colleagues brought to NEHTA and the whole e-health sector."[22] Haikerwal however, said that his decision to move on was appropriate because the eHealth systems were now being "tweaked to encompass utility, usability, usefulness and meaningful use in the products to be rolled out into the healthcare sector...[and]...I believe eHealth and the PCEHR will be the way of the future and I will continue to encourage my patients and my clinical colleagues to consider taking advantage of the benefits of these systems."[20] Peter Flemming, CEO at NEHTA explained that discussions he had with Haikerwal [aligned]..."with NEHTA’s shift in focus from designing and building national eHealth infrastructure to implementing and supporting adoption of eHealth...[acknowledging that]...Mukesh brought to NEHTA the advocacy for a clinically led national eHealth programme and built a strong network of clinical leads who are experts across the entire Australian clinical landscape."[23]

Early in the COVID-19 pandemic in Australia, Haikerwal advocated for rigorous testing procedures and turned the car park of his family physician office into a government-sponsored respiratory clinic.[24] He took a strong lead coordinating doctors in Melbourne to deal with technological issues related to systems for tracing the spread of the virus,[25] and has continued to speak freely about the challenges faced by staff on the frontline, particularly with regard to getting adequate supplies of personal protective equipment (PPE).[26][27]