VICDOC Autumn 2023 - Magazine - Page 34
PERSONAL
OUTLOOK
AS A WOMAN, I'VE HAD THE PRIVILEGE OF
HAVING A COMPLEX LIFE WITH MULTIPLE, DEEPLY
PROFOUND RELATIONSHIPS.
THE DIFFICULT PART OF MY JOB IS NOT WHAT
HAPPENS IN MY ROOM; BUT GETTING MY PATIENTS
THE SERVICES THEY NEED OUTSIDE MY ROOM.
-
I’m talking about my relationship with
my partner, but also my relationship
with others. Being a woman has fostered
a multifaceted life of work, caring for
people around me, including my children
and parents, and having several close
friendships that I really value and invest
in. I’ve come to understand these are
important elements of health, and of a
rich and full life. I see health in that
holistic way, and I think, in part,
that comes from my life as a woman.
WHEN YOU'RE A YOUNG WOMAN, AND YOU’VE GOT
WORK AND YOU’VE GOT KIDS, YOU JUST PUT ONE
FOOT IN FRONT OF THE OTHER, DON'T YOU?
I went back to work when my daughter was
two weeks old. It wasn’t my preference, but
those were the days without widespread
paid maternity or parental leave. I was in
general practice at the time, but if I’d still
been employed by a hospital, I‘d have been
entitled to three months’ paid leave. This
affected my financial ability to take leave
when I was having children, purely because
I was a GP. And that continues to be the
case. Even today, GP registrars currently
don’t have an employer-based maternity
scheme. At best they may be eligible for
the minimum Federal Government's
paid parental leave program. It’s no
doubt affecting recruitment into general
practice. Its patently unjust, inequitable
and untenable.
34
AMA VI C TO RIA
-
We need more services in general practice
to help us deliver comprehensive
GP-led, patient-centered medicine.
We need dieticians, diabetes educators,
physiotherapists, pharmacists, social workers,
social prescribers, and psychologists. We
need public hospitals to see and treat people
in a timely way. They need performance
indicators with consequences, for example
publicly available, real-time referral to
treatment times. And if outpatients can't
see people or can’t perform surgery within
a prescribed time, such as 30 to 60 days, we
need to be able to use private services. This
is what happens in Denmark. If the public
system can't respond in a timely way, the
government pays the private system to see
people, with no out of pocket expenses
for the person.
WE NEED SYSTEM REFORM TO MAKE GENERAL
PRACTICE A MORE SUSTAINABLE, MORE EFFECTIVE
PIECE OF THE HEALTHCARE PUZZLE.
Currently, general practice is remunerated
on “sausage medicine”; doctors are
remunerated best for seeing people
every five to six minutes. It's not good
care for patients and its dissatisfying for
GPs. Twenty-minute medicine, which is
my average patient time, and the average
for most females GPs, is very poorly
remunerated. We need reform around
general practice to incentivise good quality
medicine that acknowledges the time and
care patients need, that gives us the
time to listen, to be curious and to
enjoy our consultations.
➔