Chair Report – May 2017

GP Supervisors Australia last week met with The Hon. Greg Hunt MP, Minister for Health, The Hon. Dr David Gillespie MP, Assistant Minister for Health and The Hon. Ken Wyatt AM MP, Minister for Indigenous Health and Aged Care.

The take home message to each minister was that GP Supervisors remain the most efficient part of the GP Training environment and although we are at the front line busily getting on with training, long term sustainability needs to be nurtured.

You’ll notice in this edition that GPSA continues to provide all our resources freely with open access. It is a strategy that seems to resonate with Supervisors as downloads of our flashcards, participation in our webinars and downloads of teaching plans and guides continue to rise. This not only drives efficiency into GP training supporting you with best practice resources to support your teaching but importantly it helps save you time.

GPSA’s supervisor membership has grown this year to 4079, together with Practice Managers and Industry stakeholders this pushes overall membership to over 5000. You will see in our infographic. GPSA now have one of the largest datasets for the GP Supervisor workforce. This demography data is an important enabler to inform future Government workforce policy.

The sphere of influence supervisors have in delivering quality family doctors into the system has a profound and long term impact on the health budget.

Consider 50 years of appropriate evidence based practice and medicare billing. Now, consider the alternative.

This was one of the key messages we delivered to the Ministers. We are honoured that they took the time to meet with GPSA and thank them for their interest. It was clear they understood the important role GP Supervisors play within the GP training system and we look forward to continuing our dialogue with the Australian Government into the future.

GPSA has always advocated for:

• The sharing of commonwealth funded resources
• Reductions in red tape – such as the 11 forms every practice must complete for every registrar each term – 10 of them medicare forms collecting almost the same information
• Additional supports for GP Supervisors
• Reasonable reimbursement for GP Supervision

As always, we exist to serve and support our members, so if you have an idea about how we can support you better. Please pick up the phone or send us an email.

Sincerely,

Dr Steve Holmes