Back to school (or, in AGPT terms, kick-off for 2024.1!)
The way I see it, February is the GP supervisor’s second chance at New Year’s resolutions! In case that span between a bleary-eyed New Year’s Eve and the start of the new training semester has brought new clarity, you have the opportunity to re-set your expectations and start afresh!
February dawned for me with a trip to Brisbane for meetings with Chair Srishti Dutta, with ACRRM CEO Marita Cowie, with GPRA President Karyn Matterson (GPRA CEO Jo-Anne Chapman having to join online after being a late scratching for this face to face meeting about something quite historic: which will be announced next month), with AGPAL CEO Tina Janamian and with RACGP Head of CPD Karen Connaughton.
These first couple of days of the month were full-on as we explored opportunities and put together our first pre-budget submission to the Commonwealth Treasury - arguing not for a specific dollar figure on this occasion, but for the funding of GP supervision to be shared across all Commonwealth Departments: not just Health and Aged Care. This might seem a little airy and pointless, but the common refrain in Canberra is that the Health bucket is empty… which is how we have landed on the current solutions for general practice underfunding such as role substitution and alternate models of employment (under state health) for RG registrars. While all the other peaks are used to going cap in hand to government for funding, we wanted our first submission to ask for respect first for our otherwise invisible membership: respect and recognition that the future of the entire Australian health system relies on the sustainability of general practice, which in turn relies on the ability for privately-funded practices and supervisors to perpetuate the provision of quality GP training in the community.
We were very encouraged by the focus on better support for supervisors and training practices in the submissions made by ACRRM, RDAA and GPRA, and look forward to working together as a sector to prosecute GPSA’s long-held aim of seeing adequate remuneration of supervision… which far too few politicians and stakeholders still appreciate is actually not funded at all in the general practice context as the only activity remunerated under either the National Consistent Payment framework or medical student incentive payments is allocated to dedicated teaching time.
Setting these priorities is very much driven by our engagement with you as the supervisors, practice owners and practice managers we represent - and it’s to assist with this that we developed the GPSA Community as a space for peer-to-peer and member-to-GPSA sharing and dynamic interaction. Ideally this is only phase one of a double-pronged approach to increase (funded/sponsored) opportunities for face to face networking!
The first sector event for some of that face to face stuff was the annual conference of the Rural Workforce Agency of Victoria (RWAV), held in Ballarat. This was a tense time for the Ballarat locals with the disappearance of 51-year-old mother Samantha Murphy on the 4th of February still unresolved, and bushfires blazing out of control just west of the town in Beaufort and Bayindeen. While these otherwise unrelated events formed an uncomfortable backdrop to the conference, they quietly served as a reminder of the very real challenges faced by rural GPs and RGs across Australia. All in all, it was a fabulous event that brought together a diverse group of clinicians, educators, academics and peaks singularly committed to improving the health of our communities and increasing the attractiveness of general practice training for medical students and prevocational doctors.
