I am lucky enough today to be in the beautiful seaside town of Nelson Bay in the Hunter region of NSW to meet with international medical graduates (IMGs) from around the region and talk about the critical role they play in our medical workforce. I’m here with our IMG committee chair Dr Maha Selvanathan as part of the HNE Local Health District IMG masterclass hosted by another member of our IMG committee, Dr Usha Parvathy. I’m really looking forward to today’s discussions. And by lucky chance, I’ve got family nearby which will make for a wonderful weekend!
IMGs are a permanent and valued part of Australia’s medical workforce, particularly in under-serviced and remote areas. Far from being a temporary fix to doctor shortages, IMGs represent 53 per cent of the rural medical workforce and 43 per cent of all GPs in Australia.
Today, we’ve also released our updated International Medical Graduates Position Statement . We are calling for fairer, clearer and simpler pathways to work, and better funding for supervision and support to allow IMGs to practise safely and build sustainable careers in Australia.
We meet regularly with Ahpra and yesterday was another of those meetings to cover a range of issues including improving complaints handling, and recent changes to the National Law, which allow the addition of tribunal findings of sexual misconduct to the public register. These reforms are intended to protect public safety, but they must preserve the principles of proportionality, balance and fairness. An indiscriminate naming-and-shaming power is not in anyone’s interests.
Speaking of indiscriminate public shaming, we again saw the federal health minister give doctors fees a spray in the press yesterday. This short-sighted commentary fails to address the real causes of rising costs — successive governments leaving Medicare rebates to languish, private health insurance levers left on autopilot and losing impact, the erosion of value from private health insurance, and the under-resourcing and closure of many public hospital outpatient clinics. The gap between costs of care and government contributions continues to grow. Our AMA Gaps Poster is one of our most popular resources, and we’ve updated and relaunched it this week.
We also continue to promote our suite of policy solutions through our Gaps that Create the Gaps resource and I encourage you to share this information widely.
Doctors support transparency, fair and reasonable fee setting, and informed financial consent. But we can’t stand and be the scapegoats for systemic failures which are costing patients more. The AMA’s position on this has been conveyed in the strongest terms to policy makers and the general public.
Lastly, in case you missed it last week, we launched our Have the Jab Chat national social media campaign encouraging Australians to speak with their doctor about immunisation. In an online world where inaccurate information spreads faster than wildfire, we encourage people to turn to a trusted, informed and fact-checked source of advice — their doctors.
Our campaign champions your role as the most qualified and appropriate source of vaccine advice. Immunisation decisions are safest and most effective when informed by a doctor who understands a patient’s medical history, risks and circumstances. Facing our largest outbreak of diptheria in more than 75 years and deadly international outbreaks of measles, it is more important than ever that Australians have access to trusted immunisation information.
That’s all for this week’s update. I hope you have a happy and productive week ahead!
