Clinical support time for public hospital doctors 2010. Revised 2019.
Ensuring doctors have access to uninterrupted clinical support time (CST) is central to providing a safer, more efficient service delivery and patient care. MABEL research suggests that good clinical supervision and support, appropriate working hours and supported study time directly impacts trainee satisfaction, potentially affecting their quality of clinical care.
Yet feedback suggests that many doctors currently undertake clinical support roles and activities in their own time regardless of CST being allocated and without which hospitals would grind to a halt.
Governments have a key role to play in ensuring that a paid, protected allocation to CST is adequately financed and supported in public hospitals, and that access to CST is monitored and linked to performance measures that serve to enhance quality, safety and accountability.
The AMA is calling on COAG to review the National Safety and Quality Health Service Standards to ensure provisions exist to measure the performance of the health system in relation to quality of clinical training and access to protected clinical suport time.