We advocate for you the public and want to continue the delivery of quality healthcare for years to come. #qldpol #smoqld #keepourdoctors #qldjrdrs
I am a doctor who lives in Brisbane and I work as a surgical training registrar for Queensland Health. I am not a member of a union or the AMA. There is currently a crisis in Queensland with regard to the treatment of our most senior doctors by this current government led by Campbell Newman and Lawrence Springborg.
I was educated in Brisbane and am a parochial Queenslander. Upon completing high school in 2001, I moved to Sydney to undergo 6 years of medical school at the University of New South Wales. Upon completion in 2007, I chose to return to my home state to commence my internship in 2008 at the Princess Alexandra Hospital. I am 30 years old and still have 3 years of training left.
Right now my job entails:
- · 6 month rotations at various hospitals in South East Queensland to train me to be an excellent surgeon
- · On call (currently 3-4 days/week) so when your loved ones are ill and attend the emergency department with a specific surgical issue that they get care 24/7
- · Caring for all admitted patients under my specialty in the surgical ward
- · Attending and managing patients in our outpatient department (Average 30-50 patients in 3-4 hours of clinic time)
- · Performing surgical procedures on patients with direct senior consultant supervision in order to learn the craft that is surgery
- · Delivery of teaching to medical students, staff who are my junior and my other surgical training colleagues
Without training doctors, the public health system would come to a halt and you would not receive proper 24/7 treatment. Importantly, none of the above tasks can be performed without senior doctor supervision. Without senior doctors, I cannot complete my training. This will leave a huge gap in the care of Queenslanders in the future. I rely on my seniors to mentor me so that in 4 years time when I am in charge of making life and death decisions regarding your health that I make the safest and correct ones. My training college has already told me that they will move me interstate to complete my training. A loss to Queensland.
Right now, the LNP government is trying to enforce contracts on senior doctors that rip away any ability they have to practice medicine independently. There have been no proper negotiations. So what I hear you say? People go on contracts all the time. True. But these contracts are the first step toward the “Americanisation” of our health system where dollars and cents and key performance indicators drive treatment and not evidence or compassion. Imagine being told you have an illness that can’t be treated because it isn’t economically viable? Senior doctors believe in this cause so much that they will walk out of the public health system in April if the government does not return to the negotiating table. The government has vowed to replace these doctors with replacements from interstate and overseas. As you can see above, specialists train for 15-20 years and this void is not going to be filled easily. Interstate doctors won’t work under these conditions, and those from overseas…well we know what happened last time Q Health was full of unaccredited overseas trained doctors.
So what can you do? Be impartial. Mainstream media is not making a big deal of this and Doctors don’t have a proper union to make noise. We haven’t gone on strike. No services have been disrupted throughout our whole dispute. We are not greedy or thugs as Mr Springborg would suggest. We advocate for you the public and want to continue the delivery of quality healthcare for years to come.
Source: ebay !