Committee of Doctors in Training November update

We had some amazing speakers – Dr Rhea Liang was our opening keynote and spoke about managing microaggressions in the workplace – handy tips for any interactions really! Drs Daryl Hewson and Romitha Ranisinghe talked about atypical jobs in and out of medicine and Dr Rhys Thomas spoke about burnout on Saturday afternoon. On Sunday morning, Drs Sidd Sarmah, Ka-Kiu Cheung and Nick Yim spoke about the great variety in general practice and Drs Hannah Burns, Lily Vrtik, Mellissa Naidoo and Dinesh Palipana were on a panel talking about equality in medicine. 

Social highlights were definitely the Halloween-themed networking function on Saturday night and the Topgolf competition on Sunday afternoon. It was a great conference and we look forward to presenting it again in 2023. 

Mental health and wellbeing summit
We called on Queensland Health to host a mental health and wellbeing summit and this happened on 17 November. This event was thanks in part to CDT advocacy including letters to the minister and an article published in MJA insight earlier this year. 

Overall the event was still mostly a first step event about identifying the issues.

Encouragingly, the Health Minister Yvette D’Ath said the Queensland Government is actively considering legislative amendments to make Hospital and Health Service (HHS) directors accountable for the mental health and wellbeing of their staff. This is similar to new legislation in South Australia and would be a great step in the right direction in taking better care of vulnerable junior doctors. 

We are now awaiting a report from Queensland Health regarding the summit outcomes which they committed to releasing before Christmas.