President's update: Board meeting, specialist fees, and scope of practice

Happy Friday, from Canberra!

Our board met here in the ACT this week to start the year strong and ensure we remain focused on understanding your needs and delivering the best possible value to you, our members.

While in town, I also had my regular meeting with Health Minister Mark Butler. It was perfect timing, given how much health has dominated the media this week!

Unsurprisingly, the first topic on the agenda was private specialist fees. As I mentioned in last week’s update, we strongly reject the narrative that doctors are to blame for rising healthcare costs. Patients are facing higher costs — that’s undeniable — but the narrow focus on doctors’ fees completely ignores the real underlying drivers of rising out-of-pocket costs for patients: decades of inadequate Medicare indexation, chronic underfunding of public hospitals, and increasingly restrictive private health insurance policies.

You may also have seen that the federal government introduced legislation this week to allow more information to be shared on the Medical Cost Finder website. This isn’t a new commitment; it was part of their pre-election pledge. Since then, we have worked hard to ensure the whole story is told — and we’ve succeeded in ensuring transparency in medical fees is matched with transparency of Medicare rebates and health insurer contributions. We must now work closely with the Department of Health, Disability and Ageing to ensure implementation genuinely improves transparency and that the data is accurate and reflective of real-world practice. Read our media release here.

I also raised with the Minister the newly-signed public hospital funding agreement. On the face of it, we are pleased a deal was reached. A no-deal would have been disastrous. But the detail of the agreement is still to be released, and that remains a critical step to assessing the potential impacts of it, and how we can hold both state and territory governments to account in ensuring the funding flows through to our logjammed public hospitals. 

Lastly, we again discussed scope of practice. In the face of ongoing pressure from non-medical practitioners to expand their prescribing rights, we reminded the minister healthcare is about far more than medicines. Prescribing is inherently high risk and must be carefully managed within medically led teams.

Immunisation has also been back in the news this week, as we find ourselves amid the largest, longest-running pertussis outbreak on record, alongside concerningly low immunisation rates. I hope I speak for all of you when I take every opportunity in the media to reinforce the importance of immunisation and counter some of the misinformation that threatens what I see as the greatest success of modern medicine.

Lastly, our medical practice committee also met this week, progressing important policy work across many of the issues I discussed with the minister — hospital exit block, medical indemnity premiums, scope of practice, the review of the National Registration and Accreditation Scheme, digital health interoperability and AI, and medicine shortages. The brilliant work of our committees ensures the voices of doctors are brought together into strong, evidence-based positions we can present to government.

As you can see, your AMA continues to work across a broad range of issues to protect the role of the doctor, support you to thrive in your practice, and of course, promote the health of all Australians.

Until next week, thank you again for all the work you do.