Lazy days of January... #DREAMING!

January - that month of sunshine, sand, and lazy days with friends and family…

Yep: #dreaming!

This has been a month of mammoth proportions.

It's been 4 weeks of payroll tax panic.

It’s been 31 days mapping improved systems and supports to better equip practices and supervisors for a new era of training.

It’s been 744 hours trying to interpret the IKEA-worthy instructions accompanying the new practice and supervisor payment systems.

It's been 44,640 minutes managing more than 400 cries for help with only a skeleton staff (1.2 FTE).

BUT...

It's been a month of cementing our focus for 2023 and beyond, confirming that GPSA is not only very relevant to but sorely needed in this GP training space.

First up, payroll tax:

Christmas trees were still up across the country when the Queensland State Revenue Office ruling was released, effectively defining independent GPs as employees and thus making all income derived from their work (in a practice to which they pay a service fee as a tenant) part of the practice's calculable wages. Why should this matter to GPSA? Training practices pay payroll tax yes on the wages of nurses and reception staff etc, but also on the salary plus billings paid to GPs in training. Don't get me started on the fact registrars are recognised by the ATO as apprentices and therefore need to be employed while the practices employing them can't claim the payroll tax relief that comes with employing apprentices! But having GPs already on their books kind of puts training practices in the spotlight (ie why should only some GPs in a practice be subject to payroll tax). And hell's bells, if even a small percent of the nation's training practices close their doors with the financial shock this ruling will cause, especially with retrospective application, that shock will ripple out and make general practice even less attractive to the prospective GPs / RGs of tomorrow.

So we ran a rapid survey to get some data to back the anecdotes coming my way from distressed practice owners and, in just 4 days, had the responses of 580 of our members to support the RACGP and AMAQ advocacy efforts. The Medical Republic's Holly Payne ran a great article on the survey results which put it far more eloquently than I'd have done!

Amidst this flurry of activity in the middle of the month, we somehow became the gap-filler for the sector at a time when the RTOs were winding back, the Colleges were yet to take on the AGPT mantle, and hundreds of supervisors, practice managers and practice owners finally had the chance to come up for air and question what the transition was going to mean to them! This really cemented for me the need to focus on empowering GPSA members with the sense of community lost through 3 years without even a GP conference to help them connect. If the pharmacists across Australia can speak as one voice and have politicians sit up and take notice, why can't the GPs responsible for training our future primary healthcare workforce do the same?