Chair Reports -
September 2024

This month’s newsletter includes an article showcasing the sagacity of GPSA’s Deputy Chair, Dr Frank Maldari, whose insights have been fundamental to the GPSA Board throughout and prior to my term as a Director: please take a few minutes to enjoy this read. As an experienced GP, supervisor and mentor, Frank has supported peers and GPs-in-training in many ways – including through his role as SLO – and I for one am most grateful for his guidance and support.

The past month has again been a flurry of activities, with ongoing focus on bringing to our members and the sector a revised NTCER which is future-focused, sustainable, and updated with contemporaneous legislative requirements. We have been working through this extensive process with GPRA with the goal of having the new version of the NTCER Agreement ready for the 2025.1 placement processes. An immense amount of work has gone into this endeavour, and I would like to thank every GPSA member who has contributed to the review process via the survey, working parties and our negotiation party.

Another focus which created an extra bit of work for Carla and me was the College Presidential elections. We had a great time interviewing all of the candidates for RACGP and ACRRM to give our members a bit more insight into their views on the role of supervisors and practice-based GP training, and I am genuinely excited about the future for both GP specialty Colleges given the passion we uncovered. I would of course like to take this opportunity to extend my congratulations to Dr Michael Wright on his election to RACGP President, and Dr Rod Martin on his election to ACRRM President. I look forward to working and actively collaborating with both of these experienced GPs. This serves as a reminder that the election season for our sector is not yet over, with other representative roles for organisations coming up soon, and GPSA’s AGM and Board election at the end of November.

The GPSA education team continue to provide education support to our members and the most recent webinars that were of particular interest for me were around two integral parts of training that have been retained into current times – providing feedback and how to make the most of ECT visits. The former was also of interest as I had seen Dr Davies present her RACGP Future Leaders project at the GP22 conference, in the session where I too had been a contributor and was keen to learn more. The latter was designed to help integrate the roles of both supervisor and ECT visitor that I personally find very rewarding. I hope you were able to attend and if not, they remain accessible on GPSA’s YouTube channel.

I continue to support additional collaboration with other GP-focussed education and research partners to continue to bring you education and learning opportunities which keep your knowledge up to date and allow you to best share your wisdom with the trainees you support in your learning practices.

The most recent wisdom on learning I have seen is quite that highest form of learning in unlearning. We have seen some robust discussions and conversations around use of innovative technology including generative AI in our practices and certainly initial feedback looks positive in terms of improving quality of interaction with our patients and managing cognitive and administrative burden in our daily tasks. While the RACGP has published its guidance to all its members in this regard, we will be seeking further clarification on how this might specifically translate into the training context. In the meantime, I would recommend utilising a combination of an appraisal of your expertise with a generative AI tool, your trainee’s foundational competency in consultation skills, their willingness to use AI, the value they may ascribe to it, and then assessing its safety through discussion with them: as we would in many similar situations in our clinical practice in terms of shared decision making. For some of us, it is an opportunity to evaluate our learning skills as much as our teaching and supervision skills until more guidance becomes available. Patient and registrar safety remains paramount.

The GPSA team and I are looking forward to the last quarter of this year as we will be present at and contributing at many of the conferences where we are expecting to see a lot of our members – AAPM, RMA, Prevocational Forum, GP24, AIDA (PriDOC). I am always keen to meet you and hear from you via any platform or channel you feel is accessible for you. Every conversation and interaction allows me to better advocate and represent your needs and those of the roles and responsibilities we fulfill as GP supervisors and practice managers in training sites.

I will end with a quote from another family favourite and a wise sage for sure, Albus Dumbledore, Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets:

“It is not our abilities that show what we truly are… it is our choices.”

Dr Srishti Dutta
Chair