Junior doctors are being encouraged to "dob in" their bosses if senior clinicians refuse to come into work to assist while on-call overnight.

However, many of them are hesitant because they are worried it will have an impact on their career.

A junior doctor who worked at Wairarapa Hospital - and asked not to be named - said he often worried about someone dying under his watch because he didn't have the necessary experience.

Association of Salaried Medical Specialists executive director, Ian Powell, told Kate Hawkesby small hospitals don't have enough staff members to have specialist doctors working overnight.

"They do have specialists on call...but my understanding is that the senior doctors working in the emergency department, will know the level of experience of the younger doctors."

"These will be doctors in their first year or two of training and so the points they raise about inexperience are absolutely legitimate [and] the senior doctors they are reporting to know that and are accessible."

"I think when you can sometimes come across a problem is, because of understaffing, there is sometimes a need to engage doctors from other centres to help out at night."

"Now those specialists generally come from larger hospitals and are sometimes, in rare occasions, are not sufficiently familiar with the level of inexperience that these junior doctors have."

"So sometimes what the junior doctor described can happen but it's not the norm."

Staff numbers are being blamed for situations like this with a 20 per cent shortage of specialist doctors, a 50 per cent "burnout" rate for specialists in public hospitals and another 25 per cent intending to leave public health employment in the next five years.

"It's an extremely precarious situation and for that reason, we have proposed the government that the Government engage with us and the District Health Boards in a safe staffing accord. Regrettably, the DHBs don't appear to be interested in it at all and at the moment the Minister of Health [David Clark] seems to be sitting on the fence." 

He said a doctor should have at least six months of experience before working the night shift alone.  

"There is an attempt to reduce that period of time which is extremely unwise."