News

CDT Chair update - December

Published 10 December 2024

Committee of Doctors in Training Chair Dr Elise Witter says it’s been a busy few weeks for the CDT! We launched the results of our Resident Hospital Health Check in November, with significant interest from the media and from Hospital and Health Services (HHSs) around Queensland.

While some health services had seen improvement, close to a third of doctors in training continued to report feeling unsafe at work, and almost half reported burnout and fearing making a fatigue-related error at work.

We’ve been calling for evidence-based improvements in occupational violence prevention strategies, fatigue management, improved rostering and enhanced recruitment and retention of the workforce to manage workload. We will work with HHSs and government to target problem areas into the new year.

We would love to hear what you think about how your hospital went and how we can use this data to enhance our advocacy priorities. A massive thank you to everyone who participated in the survey, which is invaluable in shaping our priority areas for the year.

We are also hoping to launch our Rural Hospital Accommodation Survey soon. We want to know what the state of rural and remote accommodation is across Queensland, what features are valued and particularly what improvements can be made. Keep an eye out for this in your email soon!

With MOCA 7 bargaining coming up in 2025, it’s an important time to identify any areas that need to be included in our agreement and to flag these for escalation – our Industrial Relations Special Interest Group would love to hear from you if you have any ideas to share.

Finally, the federal AMA Council of Doctors in Training recently met in Canberra. Other states and territory chairs were impressed with our Resident Hospital Health Check completion rates (a 15 per cent increase on last year) and our Ward Call Position Statement which is in the final stages of approval. Thanks again to everyone who contributed to our Ward Call Survey earlier in the year to make this possible – the results have been presented at the BMJ International Forum of Healthcare Quality and Safety and we hope this will inspire further research into this important area!