Saving lives has become harder amid a mass walkout of doctors who have been driven to breaking point as public hospitals struggle with millions of patients.
Australian Catholic University academic Xavier Symonds says a stretched workforce does not take the decision to strike lightly for the first time in 27 years in NSW without it being driven by a deep sense of ethics.
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More than 3800 surgeries, appointments and cancer treatments have been cancelled after hospital doctors walked off the job over staggering workloads and lagging workplace conditions.
Dr Symonds says the sense of duty towards patients has caused doctors to suffer "moral injuries" as they feel disempowered to do their jobs.
"With increasing bureaucracy and increasing kind of systematisation of healthcare...what you've seen, is that health professionals feel like they can't really do the best by their patients," he told AAP.
"Our doctors and nurses and allied health professionals, are just incredibly stretched as well so it's kind of hard for them to spend much time at all with patients."
Dr Symonds, director of the Plunkett Centre for Health Ethics at ACU, said being alert to how any mistake could be fatal to patients and then being on-call after a shift needs to be managed with more holistic strategies.
"It's not like other professions, where you can just leave work in the office," he said.
"The issue with burnout is not so much that doctors aren't responsible enough, it's that they're too responsible... they can't switch off
"They've got this heightened sense of responsibility, and they give and give but eventually they just get to a point where they can't physically go on and there's a sense of disillusionment that comes."
Doctors from more than 30 NSW hospitals went on strike on Tuesday, demanding a 30 per cent salary increase and guaranteed breaks.
One of the 3500 doctors who walked off the job said conditions were putting patients at risk.
Henry Crayton said he worked 135 hours in the past fortnight, with just one day off, covering 150 patients per shift.
"That is a completely normal fortnight for me, and I'm over it," he said.
The walkout is ongoing until late Thursday.
