Time for a metamorphasis
This month we welcome a new member of the team, but an old hand in the GP training space! Pauline Ingham has started with us as our part-time Communications Manager, bringing a wealth of knowledge from her roles with EVGPT and prior to that the Victorian Metropolitan Alliance (VMA), a Regional Training Provider under the AGPT program between 2001 and 2015.
Pauline’s commencement with us serves as a reminder of how lucky we are that so much sector-wide and local GP training knowledge has been preserved and transferred through the transition to College-led training. GPSA’s purpose in a sector that has a significantly smaller number of players with the closure of the RTOs has changed in a way that we either need to transform and reinvent ourselves or quietly exit stage left. With a team and Board as passionate as mine, you can only imagine where we sit in terms of option B!
So as we head into a new financial year and the end of the first semester of AGPT delivery by the RACGP and ACRRM, we are choosing transformation. To start, we are morphing from the strong silent peak willing to pick up the slack of the Colleges to ensure the transition goes smoothly for the supervisor and practice manager members we represent, to a stronger louder membership body that demands recognition and reward for our efforts - just as we demand for our members, for all you do in supervision. We might not be as ready to toot our own horn about this as other sector stakeholders might, but my team of 4.15FTE managed more than 1,000 phone and email enquiries on behalf of “new” College staff (ex-RO staff) who were apparently unprepared for the immediate onslaught of practice queries in those first few months of training in 2023. We saw zero recognition (and naturally no financial show of appreciation!) for the hundreds of hours thus donated, hundreds of hours that could have gone into developing new GPSA resources or exploring new funding streams to increase our ability to offer networking opportunities to members across Australia.
We would love you to be a part of our journey.