Easter eggs, and an anniversary of sorts!
One thing I am not shy about sharing with the GPSA community is my personal health situation. Next month will mark the 8th anniversary of my MBC diagnosis. Going by the oncological law of averages, I should have shuffled off this mortal coil around the time COVID-19 was labelled as a pandemic. But sticking to laws of averages - or doing pretty much anything expected of me - has never been my thing.
My thing is more about making the most of every day, trusting just enough in the universe to respect the signs it sends us, and always seeking ways to improve the world for others.
Having been forced out of the corporate CEO role I'd held for 20 years to begrudgingly focus on myself through 3 major surgeries, 6 weeks of intensive radiotherapy and almost 5 years of chemotherapy, by the time the rest of the world was coming to terms with the upheaval of a global health crisis, I was just about done with my personal one.
O
ver it. Enough already. Brain fog clearing, time to use it again. Done. Even my furbabies were sick of all the time I had for them, and apparently there really is a limit to how many hats and blankets loved ones want me to crochet for them (go figure!)
So before boredom could drive me to drink, I shook off the cobwebs and accepted some casual contract work with this little not-for-profit that apparently helped the GPs who train junior doctors with webinars and resources and research. Getting my head around a whole new language of GP acronyms, creating content to help steer some amazing people through crazy uncertainty as this coronavirus that had nothing to do with Mexican beer stirred up community and political panic and made GPs even more isolated - this was a challenge I never knew I needed!
Three years on, I thankfully know a fair bit more about GPSA and its members than I did in April 2020, and by golly do I love this challenge!
Between scoffing chocolate eggs and clocking up Frequent Flyer points rushing hither tither to stakeholder meetings, this April has been (almost) all about SEM discussions, WPP meetings, team building, app developing, and a whole new communication platform for GPSA members.
Having been awarded funding under RACGP's Education Research Grants to develop a broadly-applicable quality improvement tool from our 2021 General Practice Clinical Learning Environment (GPCLE) research, we've been spending time growing our team specifically for this project, and recruited a Member Services / Operations Manager to assist me with the organisation's day to day and Board activities while I focus on what I think of as 'special projects'. One of these projects involves growing our educational / resource focus to better support supervision of the medical students and prevocational learners not covered by the grant activities for which GPSA is funded under the AGPT bucket. Another is working with a team of app developers to convert some of our physical resources into our first mobile app (pretty sure more will follow - this is so cool, made even moreso by the fact it's costing us less to create this than simply re-printing all of our existing flashcards with our new branding!). But the biggest project of all, and one that I am so excited our practice manager members are embracing so readily just 2 weeks on, is the launch and continuous improvement of our GPSA Community platform: a virtual community of practice connecting our members with each other and with us, driving home our strategic focus on strengthening the voice of our membership... Community First.