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BRUCE D. SHEPHERD
5. 8.2008
The current move by COAG promoting national registration, if implemented in its proposed form will lead to nationalization of medicine, and thus indeed of our profession. Whenever bureaucrats speak of quality and productivity they mean control.
Many of us would like to see the same requirement for registration uniform throughout Australia but I am sure none of us would like to see this implemented at the cost of our professional independence.
We have been told by Minister Roxon that uniform registration will lead to the avoidance of such occurrences as that which happened in Bega recently. If the New South Wales Medical Board and New South Wales Health cannot get it right in their own State what nonsense to say that a bureaucracy in Canberra will do a better job on, say standards in far away Darwin or Western Australia.
The truth of the matter is that this is a grab by the federal bureaucrats to take control of the profession and to dumb down its standards to fit their perceived needs of the community. No longer would we be a profession but simply a workforce.
With all standards of training and qualifications controlled by Canberra and behaviour and rewards of all doctors controlled by Canberra we have nationalization of medicine.
This is more important than the Blewett attempt at nationalization of our profession at the advent of the Hawke Government in the early 1980s. This is not only a problem for Doctor Capolingua, nor of the AMA, nor indeed only for the medical profession but is a problem for all Australians.
When I was in England in the early 1960s I was overwhelmed by the lack of responsibility of the profession towards the patients. With the increasing government interference in England this situation has worsened. If Australia wants a medical profession to work steadily at a 35 hour week this is the way to go. Recently in Sweden it was decided that doctors would see five patients per day rather than nine. Imagine the lack of continuity and the unavailability of care this would lead to, and that's exactly what is happening in Sweden as we can see by the report from Jim Wilkinson when his eighty nine year old father-in-law in Sweden had a total hip arthroplasty.
Without doctors taking individual responsibility for their patients how can our patients be cared for properly.
Unfortunately this national registration (nationalization) was conceived in the Abbott era by bureaucrats. Under a Labor Government this can be expected to spread like wildfire.
It never ceases to amaze me that bureaucrats who have obviously stuffed up our hospital system now, rather than attempting to fix that up, want to move on to something else to stuff it up. The advent of multiple layers of bureaucrats has severely diminished the care of patients in our hospital system despite the herculean efforts of doctors and nurses to overcome the shortcomings of the system.
So it is that we, as a profession, must alert our colleagues and our patients as to what is in store for them if we don't take a stand.
When Neal Blewett introduced Medicare it was touted by Bob Hawke himself as simply a health insurance scheme and nothing more. What a different monster it has become! I am indebted to Steve Milgate for the quotation from Sir Zelman Cowan's 1969 Boyer Lecture "The feeling that the air is freer today stems from the fact that we have already grown accustomed to some of the intrusions which formerly we viewed with distaste".
We have been reminded by the late Alexandr Solzhenitsyn that 'we shall reap courage and victory only when we dare to make sacrifices." Our future ability to care for patients is worth making sacrifices for. Let's go for it!
BRUCE D. SHEPHERD
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Australian Doctors Fund |