July 2022... Did someone say 'COVID'?!
3 weeks into my role as GPSA's CEO it struck me how daft it was that I'd only physically met the 2 staff members working out of the Bendigo head office 90 minutes from where I live. Don't get me wrong, I love working from home using all this amazing technology I'd never heard of before March 2020, but as a manager of such a small team, I was fixated on the need to meet each member of the team in person to get a sense of how we could best work together to equip GPSA for the changes coming in 2023.
And so this brilliant idea was hatched: 2 days and a night together in a couple of flashy 3-bedroom apartments in Melbourne's Docklands to get to know one another while sneaking in some operational strategic planning... Little did we know the person taking this photo had assumed the COVID version of Typhoid Mary...
By the time the following Monday rolled around, all 6 of us had fallen like flies immersed in Mortein with our first doses of the virus!
Even COVID couldn't hold off the announcement of our collaborative review of the National Terms and Conditions for the Employment of Registrars (NTCER) with GPRA at the start of the month. Socialising our statement of principles and new goals for this biennial review process with the Colleges and other stakeholders has taken up a large chunk of my time through July, with joint briefings dotting my calendar each and every week.
Incredibly engrossing research interviews exploring mutual willingness to show vulnerability in the supervisor-trainee alliance kicked into gear as soon as the COVID cough tapered off. This is far less lofty a concept than I first thought, underpinning the point of difference I now see very clearly between GPSA and the RTOs (soon Colleges) in this GP training context: our focus is not on what supervisors teach but how. By examining things we do naturally without conscious intent, the findings of research like this can have a massive impact on the quality of training placements our members provide the community's future GPs and RGs. I hope you find value in the work we are doing in this area and understand how important it is that you participate in GPSA research - to help us help you.