Message from the Chair - With a new Federal Government and Health Minister, the time is right to address health workforce issues.

The discussion focused on short, medium and long-term solutions – how to grow the health workforce, how to retain the current health workforce and how to improve equity of access to healthcare.  

The importance of General Practice was at the forefront of discussion on the day. I outlined the issue of GP training being undersubscribed as it currently isn’t an attractive career choice for many DiTs due to inadequate renumeration and access to leave. When a doctor leaves the hospital system to train in the community as a GP they currently take a pay cut of approximately $30,000 per year on average. They also lose access to leave due to limited potability of their leave entitlements. I advocated for a Single Employer Model to ensure that GP trainees have equitable income and access to leave compared to their hospital-based colleagues. 

I also described the increasing trend of DiTs leaving the medical workforce all together due to burnout and poor culture. This is a particular problem amongst the prevocational cohort of doctors who often feel unsupported and undervalued by their workplaces and may be losing faith in the medical education system due to the training bottleneck. Many of these DiTs feel disenfranchised and choose to locum for better pay or to pursue a different career. I expressed the importance of all prevocational medical jobs being accredited in some way to ensure a high quality of training and supervision.  

Expanding on this there is currently a focus on improving the culture of medicine. I shared that CDT is calling on the Australian Commission on Safety and Quality in Health Care to include staff wellbeing in the National Safety and Quality Health Service Standards recognising that when staff wellbeing is poor, patient care suffers. There are many strategies to improve culture in medicine, but there needs to be some sort of accreditation standard to that workplaces are motivated to make changes and are held to account.  

CDT have been doing advocacy work on these topics for a long time, and we will continue to do so until these issues are resolved. Progress is slowly being made, and it is my hope that the Government is listening and we see some positive outcomes following the Roundtable.  

The full AMA submission to the Roundtable can be found here…. 

The AMA media release for the health workforce summit can be found here. 

Dr Hannah Szewczyk