The 3 Rs of Registrars, Reviews and Research!
Easter holidays and ANZAC Day made this a challenging month with all those interruptions to the flow of productivity (not that we didn’t need the breaks!), but it is incredible how much we manage to still get done when we are committed to driving improvements for our growing membership!
This month we said adieu to daylight savings timezone confusion and a beloved team member who’s taking off on a year-long journey around Australia with her husband, and started building our NTCER working parties as the biennial review of registrar terms and conditions kicks off in earnest.
A key priority for the new NTCER emerging from our survey and stakeholder engagement (so far) has been the expansion of the Agreement to provide clarity about both the training expectations and the minimum standards framing the practice-registrar relationship: across all training pathways and contexts, not just the AGPT. This is something we have heard from our members as desperately needed for sometime now, and - having successfully proposed this as a goal for the 2024 review with GPRA - it finally looks like we will be able to give trainees and practices the certainty they deserve.
Of course this review also gives GPRA and GPSA the opportunity to address the confusion that’s plagued some of the key clauses, notably Educational Release and Administration Time. I encourage anyone reading this with a beef about the wording of any of the NTCER clauses to please email me here so I can ensure the changes you are hoping for are included in our negotiations with GPRA!
Speaking of registrars, this month we had a full-day meeting with the Commonwealth and the Australian Council for Educational Research to help with the final design of the National Registrar Survey. While it’s always great to catch up with sector stakeholders at these face to face meetings, it was particularly rewarding to have the chance to question why and how a research instrument that should most certainly promote anonymity for the safety of its participants has been constructed with the ability for the Colleges to backfill and cross-check data. This became particularly concerning when we thought about it in the context of new household income questions added for the first time this year.
As ours is a membership organisation and national peak dedicated to improving the conditions for our members through data collection, I want to assure you that all GPSA research - the majority of which is governed by Human Research Ethics Committees (HRECs) - is governed under the primary priority of participant privacy through de-identification and security of any information collected. Any queries or concerns about this should be directed to our Director of Research and Policy, A/Prof Samia Toukhsati at [email protected].
Still on the research topic, this month has seen a changing of the guard as we saw the final presentation of one medical student working with us under a Student Intensive Project (SIP) through Monash University and the scoping of a new SIP by another Monash medical student. This is a fabulous component of the medical degree that helps students recognise the value of research as a normalised element of their clinical practice - without necessarily being clinical in nature. The two topics covered this month with our guidance were (1) women in clinical leadership and (2) patient acceptance/satisfaction of medical student placements… notably topics of great interest to our members!