Medical student newsletter, Issue 6, April 2024

Contents

• Message from the Chair
• What we do
• Our role in student life
• What’s been happening?
• Professional pitfalls
• Want to know more?

Message from the Chair

Did you know that as a medical student, you are registered with the Medical Board of Australia?

We will be a feature of your whole professional life because you need to be registered to practise medicine. We will be in touch from time to time while you’re a student, to introduce you to some of the things you will need to know through your working life.

Being a doctor is an incredible privilege. Patients trust us. They allow us into their vulnerability, fears and joys. Our job is to justify that trust by being honest, ethical and trustworthy.

Medical students in Australia reflect the cultural diversity of our society, which strengthens our profession. As doctors, you will provide care for patients from all parts of our culturally and linguistically diverse community.

We all inhabit a land that, for many ages, was held and cared for by Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Peoples, whose history and culture have uniquely shaped our nation.

I wish you well in your study of medicine and look forward to welcoming you to our profession when you graduate.
 

Dr Anne Tonkin AO Chair, Medical Board of Australia

What we do

Regulation is woven into the safety net for communities across Australia. It has an important safety role in our financial and transport systems, protects the environment and strengthens the healthcare system.

To practise medicine in Australia, you need to be registered with the Medical Board of Australia.

Regulation for doctors is all about keeping patients safe, by setting standards and guiding doctors.

Our work includes:

• Ensuring high quality medical training, by accrediting university medical school programs.
• Being the gatekeepers to the profession, by only registering doctors who are qualified, competent and safe to practise.
• Investigating complaints about doctors and taking any proportionate regulatory action needed to keep doctors in safe practice and patients in good hands.

Setting standards is another important part of our role. We develop codes and guidelines for doctors.

You’ll want to get familiar with Good medical practice: a code of conduct for doctors in Australia.

In other examples, did you know:

• There are limits on using social media as a doctor.
• We have published guidance on telehealth, because algorithms are no substitute for consultations between doctors and patients.
• There are strict rules about sexual boundaries with patients.
• We have specific rules if you work in cosmetics.

You can find out more about the Medical Board and what it does in our free online educational modules for students on regulation and professionalism, which you can do in your own time.

Our role in student life

As a medical student, you're automatically registered with the Medical Board of Australia. Your medical school took care of the admin when you started university. There are no fees for medical students to be registered, and the register of medical students is not public.

The only overlap between our role as a regulator and your life as a medical student relates to your health and your criminal history. Even in these areas, it's rare for us to get involved.

You'll only hear from us if you're so unwell that we think it's not safe for you to see patients while you study medicine. And you only need to tell us about your criminal history if something so serious has happened that we have to decide whether it's safe for you to be registered. Legally, this happens if you have been charged with an offence that could lead to at least a year in jail, or have been found guilty or convicted of it.

We have no role in your academic progress and don't hear about your results.

Your medical school gave us your email address so we can get in touch when we need to, including to send you these newsletters.

Read more about what student registration means.

What’s been happening?

Updated telehealth guidelines

Updated telehealth guidelines raise standards and protect patients. Under the guidelines:

• telehealth consultations stay an important feature of healthcare in Australia
• real-time doctor-patient consultations are key to safe prescribing
• providing healthcare, including prescribing, via questionnaire-based asynchronous web-based tools in the absence of a real-time patient-doctor consultation, is not good practice.

The guidelines detail what the Board expects of doctors when they have telehealth consultations with patients. For more information, view the updated Guidelines – Telehealth consultations with patients.

Kruk review – IMG reforms underway

Health ministers have asked us to help ease workforce pressures, by creating a new pathway to fast track registration for specialist international medical graduates. The goal is to get more medical specialists into practice and providing care to patients in Australia – increasing workforce flexibility while ensuring safe practice.

A recent review recommended reforms to streamline health practitioner regulation to ease skills shortages in critical health professions. We’re on the case, and creating a new pathway to registration for specialists qualified overseas.

Read more in Ahpra’s media release on the Ahpra website.

Resources on regulation and professionalism for medical students

Check out our free, four-part series on regulation and professionalism for medical students.

You can view the modules on the Medical Board website.

Fresh lens exposes variations in experience of medical training across genders

Medical Training Survey (MTS) data for 2023 shows variations in doctors’ access to research, the quality of orientation and payment for overtime between trainees, according to gender.

While serious concerns about the culture of medicine were raised by doctors in training of all genders, non-binary trainees reported the least-safe workplace.

Read more about the gender report on the Medical Board’s website.

You can also find five years’ worth of data from the annual Medical Training Survey on the MTS website.

Professional pitfalls

Most doctors do a great job. But sometimes, things don’t go well and in rare cases, the Board refers doctors to a tribunal because it is so worried about the risk to patients from the doctor’s practice.

Tribunals operate like courts and have significant powers, including to stop a doctor’s practice by cancelling their registration. The Board only refers very serious matters to a tribunal.

Tribunal hearings are public and decisions are published. You can learn about professional pitfalls and how to avoid them by reading these tribunal decisions. Here are some recently published cases:

• a Victorian GP has been disqualified from applying for registration until 2028 for providing sub-standard care over more than a decade (Medical Board of Australia v Kemp)
• a former doctor from Victoria has been disqualified from seeking registration for a further year for inappropriate contact with a patient’s guardian (Medical Board of Australia v Datta)
• a West Australian specialist gynaecological oncologist has been reprimanded for poor record-keeping and failure to obtain informed consent (Medical Board of Australia and Tan).

Summaries of tribunal and court cases are published on the Court and tribunal decisions page of the Ahpra website. The Board and Ahpra sometimes choose not to publish summaries, for example about cases involving practitioners with impairment.

Want to know more?

For more information, see the Medical Board of Australia website and the Ahpra website.

Comments on the newsletter are welcome, send your feedback and suggestions to newsletters@ahpra.gov.au.