District Health Boards aim to restart pay talks this week.

Allied health workers including dental therapists, physiotherapists, psychologists and anaesthetic technicians have walked off the job.

Emergency care is still available.

An 11th-hour offer by the DHBs to stop the strike was turned down and labelled as a kick in the guts by the Public Service Association.

Health Minister Andrew Little told Mike Hosking it's not a simple pay dispute.

“The difficulty with this group of members, there’s 10,000, is that it straddles about 70 different occupations. Some of them are paid reasonably well at $130,000-$150,000 sort of range, some of them are paid very low.”

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