Clinician engagement

Since the last edition of The NSW Doctor, AMA (NSW) has been busy focusing on critical issues for the profession. We held a very successful forum for Private Specialists about how the AMA could support doctors working in private specialist practice. We discussed the current status of private health insurance and the challenges for the AMA and the profession in supporting private patients. We were able to talk to members about how AMA (NSW) has effectively used social media to target private health insurance consumers. We discussed the need to provide members with more resources for their practices to counter the many advice sites and information otherwise available through insurers or other sources. We will be continuing to work with members to develop these resources and activities to support members in this area.

We have also devoted significant time and energy to supporting members at Northern Beaches Hospital. AMA (NSW) has always tried to take a constructive approach to the Northern Beaches Hospital. The region had long been neglected in terms of hospital infrastructure and a new hospital was welcome. However, we repeatedly raised concerns about the challenges that would face this public-private facility, in particular the need for the hospital to work consistently within the public hospital system and to promote a culture that engages with doctors, nurses and healthcare staff, and that facilitates teaching, training and research. Sadly, as you will see from our article on p7, we have been very disappointed by the unnecessarily adversarial approach taken by Healthscope in the development of contracts. Members found themselves needing to seek advice on contracts during school holidays and with very little time available. There are still many unanswered questions about doctors-in-training coverage and whether the antagonistic nature of this process will be continued with the operation of the hospital.

To Healthscope, we have a simple message. Engage – engage now, engage with your doctors, engage with the AMA. Running a public hospital is complex and important work. The key to delivering high quality care in hospitals is ensuring engaged doctors, nurses and allied health staff. If this engagement is not re-established, it’s not going to matter what the building looks like, this project won’t work.

We have also been spending time supporting doctors with health and wellbeing. As one of our members wrote some time ago, this is sadly a task that never ends and where we all need to keep up the efforts to do everything possible to make our health system better for caring for the doctors who work within it.