From the CEO March / April 2017

2017 is only a few months in and yet it has already been a time of sadness for the medical profession. As members will have seen from news coverage and our own publications, we have seen the loss of two more young and talented doctors this year, following on from the suicide of another physician trainee in 2016.

These deaths leave us all searching for answers and wanting to make things better. We received an overwhelming response to the email from Prof Brad Frankum about the issue of doctor suicide. It is clear that nobody in the medical profession is untouched from the pain of losing a colleague or a friend. Some of the responses to the email remind us of how long we have been struggling with this issue. Many of the doctors involved in the AMA talk about first becoming involved to assist in a health and welfare issue after the loss of a colleague. One reflected in an email that they had done a significant amount of work in 2008 on a major JMO wellbeing project and how saddened they were to feel that it had not been effective. I was able to remind her that we will never know who was touched by her work and that she should never feel that her efforts did not make a difference.

Understandably, much of the feedback – particularly from our younger members – is about how we all need to do more to prevent doctor suicide. This is absolutely true. However, we need to learn from the work of the past and build on it to go forward, not go over old ground.

Two key themes are emerging very strongly from the feedback. The first relates to the incredible demands on our public hospital doctors. Our hospitals have seen year-on-year growth in demand. Doctors-in-training are working under intense pressure and their senior doctors and supervisors are also being pushed with service delivery, meaning there is no time for proper teaching or mentoring. Hospitals must be about more than just churn and service delivery.

The other key theme from the feedback was about the failure of mandatory reporting with regard to treating doctors.

Mandatory reporting is a controversial issue. It came in on my watch as we faced the public furore around Graeme Reeves. It was seen as a political solution to a major lack of public confidence in doctors speaking up against their own. We worked to get the bar for reporting as high as possible and under the law, there are very few things that a treating doctor would actually have to report. However, the problem is not the law, it is the perception of the law. That perception and fear is now so entrenched and so widespread that we know that doctors will continue to avoid seeking help unless there is a change. Our colleagues in WA achieved such a change in their State law some years ago and the AMA has been advocating for this amendment nationally for some time. We will be redoubling our efforts to advocate on this issue.

Sadly, suicide has not been the only affliction on our profession. Following the tragic death of Dr Ann Formaz-Preston in a cycling accident in December, we have had at least two other members experience serious cycling accidents. My love and thoughts go to their families.