More involvement, better communication, greater results

Dr David Rivett

Australian Medicine

16 November 2009

Having just attended the last AMACGP meeting in Canberra, I can assure you that the AMA is being reinvigorated and updated following our recent leadership changes.

There is a huge focus both on communicating better with the whole profession (members and non-members) and on getting younger doctors involved in policymaking. One huge hurdle is our organisation’s lack of email addresses.

Can I ask each of you reading this far to take a few minutes to provide your contact email details to the AMA office in your State or Territory, and to ask every other doctor you meet - member and non-member alike - to do so also. Please include your craft group and indicate what areas of the profession you work in when forwarding this information.

If we are to serve you we need to be able to access your opinions in a rapid and cost-effective manner. Needless to say members’ views will be given more weight than non-members.

Your help in this matter is vital in collating an up-todate database and empowering your profession’s peak representative organisation. Please get involved over the last few months of this year by reminding your colleagues to get their data in at every opportunity. In this time of proposed widespread and rapid change in care provision, we must be able to get sound direction from our grassroots more than ever.

Blogs will be enhanced on the AMA websites to allow you to input into current issues. If these are difficult to access or not user-friendly please let the AMA know.

Meanwhile, the NHHRC’s recommendations for a move to primary care provision via one stop clinics has caused the issue of the anti-competitive nature of pharmacy regulation to surface again.

As you all realize, the current situation is that, while pharmacists can own medical centres, doctors cannot own pharmacies, and relocation of existing pharmacies or setting up new ones within a rifle shot of an existing one is banned.

Currently one has more chance of building a successful moon rocket in one’s backyard from coke cans than of introducing a pharmacy into a primary care centre.

If this absurdity is allowed to continue, the move to integrating pharmacy into GP-led primary care centres will be rendered extremely difficult.

Indeed, to me it is totally unfathomable as to why the ACCC allows the existing overtly protective legislation and regulation, which benefits a small group of pharmacy owners at great cost to the community to survive in this current age.

Certainly in rural Australia, co-location of pharmacy and medical care and the better integration of our two professions will enhance care provision and let us better serve the growing numbers of elderly Australians with multiple co-morbidities on ever-growing numbers of medications.