Release of the AMA Work-Life Flexibility Report

This is a grass roots survey - information from our doctors on the ground, and it tells us that indeed we need to care for our doctors, look after them, so that they can continue to care for us as patients across the country. Alex…

DR MARKWELL: Thanks Dr Capolingua. I think this survey is a really important survey to be releasing at this time. Those of you have read the summary will know that 85 per cent of doctors have indicated that they want access to flexible working arrangements, which is an enormous proportion of our current work force.

If we don't support these doctors we're going to lose them. They're not going to stick around the medical workforce. We need to support these doctors, we need to offer them what they want so that we can keep them in the workforce, and hopefully in some situations actually bring them back into the workforce where they may have actually left to go and have a family or to pursue other careers or take study breaks for example.

There's a lot of information in this survey. There's a lot of detail here, but the overwhelming message is that we need to work with hospitals, administration, colleges. We need to look at better ways in supporting our doctors and really enabling them to work in our public system.

And I guess an example to really bring home the message, doctors at the moment if they can't access the time off that they need they're going to leave. We've got reports of only one per cent of female respondents accessing child care and maternity leave. That's one per cent of our workforce who really need access to more support there.

The other things that we need to overcome are major barriers. We need to overcome the mindset of the profession. Unfortunately our senior doctors perhaps feel that doctors should still continue to work the hours that they used to work when they went through. And we also need to get the colleges and the hospitals to change their way of thinking and look at better ways of rostering, of more flexible working arrangements so that we can keep these doctors in the workforce.

QUESTION: It seems to be a perennial problem doesn't it? It comes up every year and there doesn't seem to be any solution to it. I mean what do you see as - can you lobby hospitals or something?

DR CAPOLINGUA: I agree with you. It is an ongoing problem. We're still suffering from the concept where doctors worked 120 hours a week, and some still do almost, which is not acceptable. So it's taking a long time to change the culture and thinking about. As Alex has even described, even you know peers, senior doctors in the system, still believe that you need to be out there slaving away.

And many doctors are totally committed to their work, and certainly during their training do work long and extended hours and we have to make sure that we enable them to have that flexibility so that they're not necessarily coming down to part time hours, but certainly the flexibility around the hours so they can make it work within the fact that they're just like any other human being. They have families, they have other responsibilities, they can be studying at the same time and we have to make it work better for them.

So it's about changing the culture over all of the thinking, moving away some longstanding preconceived ideas about how doctors should work. And working with the colleges and the hospitals to get them to take on board the fact that if we don't look after them this way - you know, we have lost doctors out of the public sector - this is one of the reasons why they go, because they can't manage.

QUESTION: Isn't there still a real sort of medical GP clinics that it's not necessarily…

DR CAPOLINGUA: The vertically integrated corporate clinics, yes.

QUESTION: Yeah. I mean to what extent do you think that there could be an increase in referrals in the future because of this?

DR CAPOLINGUA: Even in those models the doctors themselves receive no kickback. There is no monitor return to the doctor for pathology referral.

The corporate who owns perhaps the pathology and the general practice, they're the ones that make the profit. The doctors themselves are certainly not influenced by any pecuniary interest directly, and we would not want them to be.

QUESTION: Yeah. Do you think though that there's a need for more proportion in terms of allowing the ownership structure to change …?

DR CAPOLINGUA: We could have a whole discussion around that. The AMA has always expressed concern about any vertical integration arrangements. And that is a very big conversation we could have. And I don't know whether we want to go into that detail here today.

QUESTION: A role for Government perhaps?

DR CAPOLINGUA: I think it's a big role for the profession and perhaps we may need to talk to government to assist us in ensuring that patients are always protected in those sorts of models.

Ends