View this article online at www.insightplus.mja.com.au
A healthy, safe and engaged healthcare workforce is fundamental to a high performing and sustainable health system that delivers high quality patient care.
Over the last decade, I have worked with a team of editors and authors on an international book on sexual harassment in medicine, which has been published by Cambridge University Press. It has been a long, sometimes surprising and deeply disturbing analysis of a complex problem with world-wide ramifications.
Australia’s health system is confronting workforce, safety, equity, and sustainability crises, with profound consequences for patients, clinicians, and communities. These grand challenges cannot be solved without strong clinical insight at the governance table. Yet doctors remain under-represented on health boards, often because they underestimate their ability to contribute. This opinion piece outlines how clinical leadership at a governance level can significantly contribute to better patient care, safer workplaces, and a strong, sustainable health system.
The cosmetic surgery industry in Australia has undergone significant regulatory reform in recent years in direct response to horrifying media reports of appalling patient stories and devastating outcomes. Plastic surgeons have been advocating for various reforms to the industry for many years, informed by our own experiences of seeing patients who had been harmed by those with inadequate surgical training and experience.
As a medical practitioner, you pride yourself on being meticulous, analytical, and aware of risks vs outcomes. Qualities that define your profession. Yet without an estate plan, everything you’ve built remains vulnerable. Your business, your assets, and your legacy deserve the same level of diligence as being a clinician.
Under new industrial manslaughter laws, a doctor’s suicide linked to workplace mental injury may no longer be just a tragedy – it can be a crime. All medical workplaces, colleges, medical defence organisations (MDOs) and the AMA must unite to address systemic WHS breaches and to strengthen, coordinate and fund evidence-based suicide prevention initiatives in medicine. Failure to do so may expose individuals and organisations to catastrophic penalties including imprisonment – but, more importantly, cost more doctors’ lives.
As our population ages, so too do our doctors. But ageing physicians should still play an active and leading role in our health care workforce, writes Steve Robson.
Amid unprecedented medical workforce pressures, many doctors are rethinking their futures. Yet new WHS laws provide the tools to protect our wellbeing and our careers — if we use them. This piece urges every doctor to lead by example: know the law, speak up about poor working conditions and other abuses safely, and advocate for better health system resourcing — together.
At the Medical Deans of Australia New Zealand (MDANZ) Conference on September 4-5 in Newcastle, data from the Royal Australian College of General Practitioners (RACGP) and Australian College of Rural and Remote Medicine (ACRRM) was presented, analysing the association between medical school graduation and entry into general practice and rural generalist (GP/RG) training in 2025.
