General Practice continues to show we are resilient and resolute despite the challenges that have come our way – attempting to return to a new normal post-COVID, the MBA’s new CPD requirements, and the transition to College-led training to name a few.
The year has also brought opportunities to reconnect, reinvigorate and reinvest ourselves in sharing, teaching and learning across the many events where GPSA has been well represented: PONC, RDAQ, GPME, AAPM, RMA, WONCA, the Australian and New Zealand Prevocational Medical Education Forum, and AIDA. I am sure our members and stakeholders maximised these opportunities to meet with our CEO Carla Taylor, COO Leonie Chamberlain, my predecessor Dr Kevin Arlett, Education Manager Dr Simon Morgan, and Director of Research and Policy Dr Samia Toukhsati.
The GPSA board remains committed to supporting all staff members in our small but effective team in order to deliver high quality educational content, trailblazing research, and useful resources. We envisage these activities and resources will ensure ongoing support to our supervisor and practice manager members, and keep us aligned with our ultimate mission to be the voice of a thriving GP training sector that is united, suitably recognised, rewarded, and respected as the cornerstone of this nation’s healthcare system.
This year we have run a total of twenty (20) webinars that were attended and viewed in record numbers by our members, and the GPSA teaching plans and guides continue to be widely downloaded by supervisors – and at times registrars to support their learning. Kudos to our education team Drs Simon Morgan, Jess Wrigley and Matt Burden, the latter two joining GPSA in an official capacity this year.
The research and policy team has more than its fair share of wins too, having just learnt we’ve successfully secured funding for “Strengthening the recruitment, support, and retention of women GP supervisors: a framework and implementation model” from the Royal Australian College of General Practitioners’ (RACGP) Education Research Grant 2024 program. This is a legacy piece that was conceived under the guidance of Dr Nicole Higgins in her time as Chair.
GPSA also launched the “Scenario” mobile app – a clinical reasoning toolbox designed to augment the learning experience for educators, supervisors, medical students, and trainees alike – and will soon be rolling out a student-facing forum app that ties in with this, “ScenarioEd”, for medical students and trainees across the globe to better experience the international community of practice we work in.
We are indeed still the little team that gets a lot of stuff done!
I take on the role of Chair for the GPSA Board with a mixed bag of emotions. On the one hand, we said goodbye to Dr Kevin Arlett our previous chair, Dr Justin Coleman and Dr Madhu Tamilarasan – all stalwarts in their own right in the GP training domain. You will be missed. Yet at the same time I am looking forward to working with an incredibly talented and diverse Board with two new members, Drs Nick Tellis and Shea Wilcox. We are grateful you have chosen to bring your wisdom and enthusiasm to the GPSA board. This a Board that seeks to represent the best aspects of GP training and its members in its diversity. It captures not just diversity of identity, also of skills, thinking, type of trainees, geographical location, and GP experience/roles. We haven’t quite reached perfection, but I am a firm believer of progress over perfection.
Lastly, I will say this: the coming year will bring us many new issues to navigate such as the 2024 review of the NTCER, new rounds of GP registrar placements, Single Employer Model, and a steady increase in the number of medical student placements in community general practice. Ultimately it is the junior doctor and medical student experience that is a testament to how we have succeeded in enabling and ensuring a safe and thriving learning environment. We will continue to work closely first and foremost with GPRA and indeed other peak bodies – RACGP, ACRRM, AIDA, RDAA and AMA – and advocate for sustainability of our supervisor workforce and training practices.
Training practices and supervisors currently function in an imperfect environment and yet have always delivered effective teaching. Supervisors are to GP education what GPs are to the nation’s healthcare; this expert generalism in training / teaching under our apprenticeship model is not easy to measure and too often feels invisible. Future-proofing GP teaching and training includes making supervision in practice viable and sustainable – financially and in terms of cognitive effort. I hope we do not forget that there is a fine line between heroism and martyrdom.
To the members of GPSA, this is an organisation that is inclusive in values and in action. I invite supervisors irrespective of where you are and who you supervise/teach to join the GPSA Community. The Community reflects our commitment to developing communication channels for peer-to-peer networking and mentoring, and we will receive all member contributions with gratitude.
To end (and this is particularly for the Marvel fans amongst us), I will borrow the words of the one called Optimus Prime: GPSA members and potential members, “it is time to come home!”
Date reviewed: 30 November 2023
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Date reviewed: 26 October 2023
Please note that while reasonable care is taken to provide accurate information at the time of creation, we frequently update content and links as needed. If you identify any inconsistencies or broken links, please let us know by email.
Date reviewed: 12 October 2023
Please note that while reasonable care is taken to provide accurate information at the time of creation, we frequently update content and links as needed. If you identify any inconsistencies or broken links, please let us know by email.
I thank you for your support of our recent Media Release outlining our reasons to be enheartened by the long-overdue acknowledgement of our GP supervisor and practice team members in the recently published Medical Deans Australia and New Zealand (MDANZ) Position Paper: Doctors our Communities Need: Building, Sustaining and Supporting the General Practice Workforce in Australia and New Zealand.
Throughout this year we have been actively lobbying the Department and other GP organisations, particularly in the forum of the General Practice Training Advisory Committee (GPTAC), for a concerted effort to unify the many and disparate entities involved in pathways leading to vocational GP training. In the fragmented space we’ve endured for far too long, the placement experiences crucial to attracting more medical students and prevocational doctors to a career in general practice / rural generalism have invariably been under-valued and thus under-supported. Changes arising from the AMC’s new supervision framework also make future supervisor disengagement increasingly likely due to new requirements failing to recognise the experience of AGPT-accredited supervision, resulting in unnecessary and time-consuming duplication of PD activities.
When MDANZ published their Position Paper recommending the need for increased exposure to general practice to improve the attractiveness of our specialty, their focus on more and higher quality GP placements for medical students and prevocational doctors – underpinned by an appropriate level of support and remuneration, and greater consistency across the educational spectrum – effectively signalled the very change Carla and I have been advocating for. DOHAC has been very supportive of our work to facilitate greater interaction between MDANZ, CPMEC and the GP specialty Colleges, recognising the value of turning the spotlight on the GP supervisor as best placed to encourage more interest in our profession. Subsequent discussions with MDANZ indicate a strong willingness to work with GPSA, inviting our members to embed their observations and suggestions in a new curriculum for general practice at the university level. This is really very exciting.
Of course October is ‘Conference Season’ for our sector, and we are excited to be participating in a number of conferences around the country. We hope to catch up with you at any or all of the AAPM, RMA23, WONCA, PMEF and AIDA events. See full details of our conference involvement in the body of the newsletter or on our website here.
We have also been working diligently on the development of our Scenario App, scheduled for release in time for RMA23. This mobile app will produce case scenarios and prompts across a range of topics for supervisors to incorporate into their teaching sessions with registrars and students. It promises to be an indispensable educational tool with international application, noteworthy for its origin right here in Australia. Excitingly, all profits generated by this resource will be directed right back into our support of the GP training sector. Who knows, maybe GPSA will be running its own national networking conference for our members before long?
While GPSA has been directing energy into innovation and greater recognition and reward for our members, we all have a role in fighting for our profession. As supervisors and training practice teams we need to ensure that whatever role we play in supervision is performed at the highest level of quality possible, displaying just why general practice is the best medical specialty and one that all doctors should strive for. The trust and value bestowed upon us by our patients reinforces every day how important we are to the community. Ours is probably one of the most difficult specialties in medicine, but it is also one of the most rewarding – especially when we band together as a community of practice and support one another.
Stay strong and keep on keeping on.
Date reviewed: 25 September 2023
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It’s a little difficult to perceive the changed interpretation of unchanged state legislation as anything other than general practice being lobbed around as a political football. There are a lot of practices running scared – especially training practices, where payroll tax is already applied to the salaries of GPs in training, putting us in the spotlight as ‘payroll’ calculations will be expected to expand to all the other GPs in our practices including those ‘independent’ practitioners contracting the practice for services, rooms etc.
Some states (Queensland and SA) have offered payroll tax amnesties, and of course there’s been quite a bit of noise about the ACT’s offer of ‘conditional’ amnesty: hingeing on a pledge by practices to bulk bill 65% of their patients. Other jurisdictions have not offered any notion of relief, such as NSW and Victoria, and I’m in two minds about this. I personally am very concerned that the term ‘amnesty’ implies an admission of guilt, much as the concept of ‘exemption’ makes the liability seem beyond challenge. And retrospective application? That has the very real potential of crippling primary healthcare – and in turn our entire health system – across this country.
Benjamin Franklin (that man on the USD $100 note) gave us the saying about death and taxes, and yes, it applies equally now as it did more than 2 centuries ago: one way or another, this seemingly unjust tax will hit us as GPs, and it will change the profession as we now know it.
I hope and pray that this situation will not deter high quality practices from training the next generation of high quality GPs. This has the potential to even further derail the pipeline of young doctors into this specialty. We already have fewer registrars than training positions and we need to be encouraging entry into general practice, not allowing state governments to sabotage it.
What is key here is that everyone should really be seeking expert advice as to their next steps in line with their own individual circumstances. And then we should be activating the power of our voice as a community of practice. We know the RACGP and AMA are fronting up to the state governments to tackle this issue, and they have had some real wins along the way. But do you as supervisors and training practice owners / managers feel like your voice is being heard in these discussions?
GPSA members are the last bastions of high quality, independent primary healthcare. We as individuals and businesses are responsible for roughly 85% of the training required for a doctor to achieve fellowship in general practice. We can make or break the medical student / prevocational doctor’s passion for this specialty, which often comes down to how often we denigrate ourselves as “just GPs” and how much of our stress over the sustainability of what we do seeps into our trainee interactions.
On the flip side, we are substantial in number; but, instead of activating this as a community of practice working together to advocate with one voice, we are either putting our energy into complaining as lots of separate individuals on Facebook / LinkedIn, or burying our heads in the sand… waiting for someone else to do something about it. By rallying together, we can use our undeniable powers of reasoning and deduction to strategise and problem-solve, to plan and find a way forward that doesn’t compromise our values, reputation, or financial stability.
For our part, we continue to work with GPRA, building on the relationship forged through the NTCER review process last year to strengthen the understanding that our memberships represent the two sides of the GP training coin – that we are not just investing our time and energy in short-term workforce but potentially our future colleagues and maybe even business partners. We are shoring up areas of alignment in terms of advocacy, research and education and undertake regular meetings jointly, in particular with state health departments around upcoming Single Employer Model (SEM) pilots, trying to guide and offer assistance as we can. It’s great to report that our offers of help are being well received – and our views on embedding quality training and ensuring unintended consequences of these individual arrangements don’t do more damage to general practice and the communities that rely on its sustainability are also being heard.
Carla and I also find great value in our regular meetings with both Colleges, where we have the opportunity to advocate strongly for GP supervisors and practice teams and offer our assistance as a sector conduit to keep the changes through this ongoing training transition on track from our members’ point of view.
We are also meeting with the Commonwealth monthly, which is a terrific platform for this community of practice to have a voice. It is in this forum that we have been able to express that reality that even the goodwill embedded in “My Medicare”, and other Commonwealth strategies being implemented with all the best intentions, are being tainted by the jurisdictional payroll tax ‘attack’. An interesting fact is that if a practice has payroll taxes of significant levels, then these are a tax deduction that reduces what the ATO would otherwise receive from that business. When I suggested that Treasury may be interested in this at one of our recent GPSA / DOHAC meetings, eyebrows were certainly raised!
So you see we have been nurturing a range of relationships across the sector to voice your concerns and solutions. It’s just so important to remember that together we can make a real difference.
Virtually we are bringing our members together through the GPSA Community initiative, and now we are rolling out our face-to-face member networking events starting with Brisbane on Wednesday 20th September. Nothing fancy, just a chance to catch up with your peers and chat with us about the things that matter to you. You can read more about this, and a whole lot of exciting opportunities and updates, in this month’s e-newsletter. And then you can start a conversation with us and with your colleagues via GPSA Community, and help shape the powerful voice this community of practice needs to activate.
Date reviewed: 31 August 2023
Please note that while reasonable care is taken to provide accurate information at the time of creation, we frequently update content and links as needed. If you identify any inconsistencies or broken links, please let us know by email.
As the end of the year approaches at warp speed, we now turn our attention to what lies ahead. GP Supervisors might think of this as a reference to the Unknown Unknowns of Jahari’s Window, but I’m more concerned today about the Known Unknowns of the hectic Conference and AGM season coming up in October / November!
GPSA’s amazing team will be front and centre at several conferences this year, presenting on research, education and GP training initiatives at RMA, WONCA and (fingers crossed) the National Prevocational Medical Education Forum. Just one of the research topics we’ll be spruiking at these events is the “GPCLE” (GP Clinical Learning Environment). Building on previous research, this project – funded through the 2023 RACGP Educational Research Grants and overseen by a Steering Committee that could easily be confused for the United Nations so extensive is the quality and breadth of its membership – involves the development of an essential quality evaluation tool for Australian training practices. Under the leadership of our highly experienced Director of Research & Policy, Dr Samia Toukhsati, the GPCLE project exemplifies two features that make GPSA stand out in this space:
On top of multiple research / education presentations, by the time we arrive at RMA23 and WONCA, GPSA’s mobile app “SCENARIO Toolbox for Supervisors” will be ready for you to test and review. This is just one of the innovations we have been working on to keep our resources relevant and accessible into the future. Another is the GPSA Community Platform, developed to help you connect and engage with this very special community of practice; to share ideas and drive solutions for others in your region, and for the sector more broadly. Supervisor Liaison Officers are now facilitating jurisdicational networking on this Platform too, making it even easier for you to reach out for help and stay in touch with peers locally and across the country.
As mentioned previously, the Practice Managers on the Community Platform put the rest of us to shame with their easy adoption of this new communication channel back in April… My challenge to you Supervisors and Practice Owners is to get involved: start a conversation, comment, message one another and join groups that resonate with you whether through your role, geographical location and / or special interest(s)! Of course, if you haven’t activated your account on the platform yet, you should probably start there!!
While this challenge is only intended to promote healthy competition, it also serves as a reminder that Practice Managers are eligible for election to the GPSA Board this year. A significant amendment to our Constitution passed by Special Resolution at the 2022 AGM elevated Practice Managers to “Ordinary” members of GPTA Ltd, allowing one of the seven elected Directors to be a Practice Manager (alongside six active GP Supervisors). The reason I am highlighting this now is because, in two very short months, we will be calling for nominations for Directors.
Four positions will be voted on at this year’s AGM, which will be held via Zoom from 7.30pm AEDT on Monday 13th November, 2023.
Are you ready to help us take GPSA into the future?
Date reviewed: 28 July 2023
Please note that while reasonable care is taken to provide accurate information at the time of creation, we frequently update content and links as needed. If you identify any inconsistencies or broken links, please let us know by email.
For this month’s Chair Report, I thought we might share a summary of the work GPSA has been focusing on for our members over the first 6 months of the year:
If you would like to know more about any of this work, please use the form on this page to contact Carla and myself.
In the meantime, wishing you all the best as Semester 1 wraps up and we move into the second half of 2023.
Date reviewed: 28 September 2023
Please note that while reasonable care is taken to provide accurate information at the time of creation, we frequently update content and links as needed. If you identify any inconsistencies or broken links, please let us know by email.
Date reviewed: 05 June 2023
Please note that while reasonable care is taken to provide accurate information at the time of creation, we frequently update content and links as needed. If you identify any inconsistencies or broken links, please let us know by email.
It just gets busier!
Hi all, Carla and I have been very busy again since my pre-Easter report, but all the hard work is definitely paying off!
As mentioned in the previous few months, we have been meeting with various states and territories to insert the argument for quality supervision into their individual plans for Single Employer Model (SEM) pilots. With every jurisdiction doing things differently, we continue to have a particular affinity with the Tasmanian model, which is very strongly rooted in the goal of supporting the private model of general practice over increasing their numbers of hospital employees.
The Tasmanian team is even considering our preferred model, where the registrar might complete GPT1-2 (or RG equivalent) under the state Single Employer then transition to practice employment governed by the NTCER, allowing access to earnings against billings only when they have had time to acclimatise to the general practice environment and gained an understanding of how to bill correctly, etc. We have also floated this option by a number of sector stakeholders, government representatives from NT, WA and Queensland, and have started working with ACRRM to explore potential for other options to give senior RG registrars greater flexibility than traditional practice-based employment allows at the tail end of their training.
What seems key at present is that alternate models of registrar employment are coming, and we need to be open to ideas that may well change what we have built our business models around as training practice owners. Not all change is detrimental… But we are working very very hard to ensure that we as a community of practice have visibility over and a prominent voice in any decisions leading to change for our sector.
I implore you to please maximise the opportunities we offer for you to have a say in all that’s happening around us in the GP training landscape. Activate your free membership to the GPSA Community Platform and join a Community Group (or 10)! Take a few minutes to complete the National Supervision Survey, which feeds into our work on Advisory Councils for the Workforce Planning and Prioritisation organisations across the country as well as guiding our research, education and advocacy priorities. It is so important that we all contribute to the findings of this important survey. You can read more about this here or contact our Director of Research & Policy, Dr Samia Toukhsati, with any queries here.
GPSA is committed to supporting the people and businesses that underpin the future of primary healthcare in this country. We are a sector conduit, a driver of innovation and quality, and an advocate for respect and recognition for this community. GPSA is not a group of Board members or the small team of employees who deliver educational interventions and resources, members supports, research and policy. GPSA is the community we serve… So don’t be a stranger!
Date reviewed: 27 April 2023
Please note that while reasonable care is taken to provide accurate information at the time of creation, we frequently update content and links as needed. If you identify any inconsistencies or broken links, please let us know by email.
It might not make great material for a Netflix doco, but a day in the life of the GPSA Chair is certainly proving far from dull as Carla and I navigate all the meetings with and requests from members and sector stakeholders! And this is only a couple of months into the training year!
Our accomplishments are starting to stack up though, making it all worthwhile…
GPSA’s Community Platform
On 19th March we started inviting our members to join the new community platform tied to the GPSA website, where we still offer all 1,000+ resources free and open-access. This new concept is designed to enable our members to more readily connect with one another, with us, and ultimately with representatives of the Department, Colleges and other sector stakeholders. This has been a really quiet “soft” launch as the last thing we want to do is overwhelm anyone with so many changes afoot through the Transition, especially in terms of IT systems. But hats off to our practice manager members, who have jumped in and started helping one another develop strategies and solutions by creating discussions under their private community Discussion tab. Now the challenge is on for our supervisor and practice owner colleagues!
If you haven’t activated your account already, it’s really easy to log in, join one or more Community Groups, and virtually step outside the consulting room for a few moments: if only to reduce the feeling of isolation that comes with our profession.
2023 National Survey
On the topic of our wellbeing, I note that this year’s National Survey is being launched on Thursday 6th April, and will include some follow-up to last year’s survey which produced this report summarising our perspectives on wellbeing and selfcare. Importantly, this annual survey will give you a chance to share your individual reflections on the new training regime and what it will take to make this a thriving sector into the future. Please make the most of this opportunity as we really are in a position to influence change with your participation – noting the data we collect from this questionnaire is used for our advocacy work and representation on advisory committees such as for the various Workforce Planning and Prioritisation (WPP) organisations. AND you can be credited for an hour of CPD as an added bonus!
New branding, new identity
The new GPSA logo has been developed and will now start to be rolled out across our various touchpoints – website, emails, social media etc.. The new icon is indicative of our evolution from GP Supervisors Australia to GP Supervision Australia, really reflecting what we do and the partnership between the Supervising Practices, Supervisors, Practice Managers and the GP Registrars that we are collectively supporting. When asked “who” GPSA is, traditionally we would have pointed to the voluntary Board of Directors at the top of the triangle, beneath us the small team (<4FTE) of employees, and at the bottom the community we represent. By contrast, today we refer to GPSA as the community first and foremost, with the team supporting you from below, and the Board beneath them as the cornerstone of the organisation, with our new branding symbolising this new identity especially as it relates to whole-of-practice scaffolding of the learner / trainee, and flattening of the hierarchy in supervision.
CPD made easy
I hope that you are all attending our Webinars, there are so many great topics being covered and wonderful hints for how to work with your Registrars. Pearls of wisdom keep getting dropped by presenters and participants. AND, now we are approved CPD providers for RACGP (soon ACRRM also), we can automatically add a CPD hour to your CPD Home account when you attend these (generally webinars are approved for Educational Activity) and an additional hour for Reviewing Performance when you go on to complete the post-webinar activity we now offer. The team is currently working on converting recordings of past webinars and other static educational resources on the website into online modules to help increase CPD opportunities for you. All free for our members: so be sure to make use of this!
GPSA keeping your voice heard out there
We have regular meetings with RACGP and ACRRM regarding their training developments and both Colleges are very supportive of our role in assisting with this. Member feedback has been that the Transition has predominantly gone smoothly; but, as always, there have been a few hiccups along the way. Mostly these are small and fairly easily resolved. We also meet regularly with GPRA, continuing to work together to enhance the experience of Registrars and Supervisors, and with the Government at different levels and in different groups. I believe that the respect that we have earned with all our engagement has been well worthwhile. We continue to advocate for all our members at all levels and are being listened to.
One space that we are working hard to involve our community in is the Single Employer Model pilots being rolled out across Australia. This is a departure from how GP Registrars have been employed in the past, mainly as a solution for the rural sector, so we are keen to understand and help shape these models in order to drive the best outcomes possible for all Registrars (our future workforce!) and with minimal unintended consequences. These pilots will look different across the country, but quality of training must remain paramount: we will keep pushing the Quality barrow always. A quick note that any Tasmanian Practice Owners / Practice Managers or Supervisors are invited to join the private group we have created on the community platform called “Tasmania’s SEM”, to which we have given members of the team running the Tasmanian pilot access so they can answer any questions you may have as potential participants in their trial.
Well, all the best from me and enjoy your Easter, but just remember, not too many Easter Eggs!!
Kevin
Date reviewed: 15 April 2023
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