General practice is hard enough without soul-sapping bureaucracy to deal with, writes Dr Linda Calabresi
I experienced the triple whammy a few weeks back. And no, my kidney function is just fine, thank you.
This triple whammy was the horrific combination of a My Aged Care referral, an ATAPS referral and my attempt to check a patient’s vaccination history on the Australian Immunisation Register! Aaaaarrrggghh!
Seriously! I know forms and paperwork are not my forte, but the three together took so much time, created so much angst and, in the case of the immunisation register, was an exercise in frustration.
To be fair, the My Aged Care referral was reasonably straightforward, even if time-consuming, and I received an email receipt once it was submitted.
But the ATAPS referral was far less satisfying. Apparently, in our area at east, the system has recently changed. No longer do we get allocated a code number for our patient and communicate directly with the ATAPS psychologist. Now we have to complete their specific eight-page document that includes every detail of the patient’s history (often multiple times), the mental-health care plan (their format not ours) and the K10, and send that to a 1300 fax number of a central administrative body which will assess the case and allocate my patient to a psychologist, who will then contact the patient.
I must admit the whole process took much longer than it should have because I felt obliged to express my concerns to the nice lady at ATAPS about sending eight pages of very personal information to some faceless body which will then make decisions about my patient’s mental-health management in some time frame that I’m not privy to. So that was another 30 minutes I won’t get back again – and, as you can imagine, I wound up completing the referral and faxing the document.
And then there was the Australian Immunisation Register. I thought it would be so easy. A mother whose two-year-old had some vaccinations overseas just wants to check the child’s AIR was up to date. All the immunisations are recorded in our medical records, so it should be fine. I’ll access the register and check after work, I said. After 45 minutes, I gave up. I may have been doing something wrong, but I couldn’t get access for love nor money. And it seems I’m not an isolated case. It certainly wasn’t intuitive.
General practice is hard enough without having this sort of soul-sapping bureaucracy to deal with. It’s a common complaint in this job, I know, but that doesn’t make it easier.
And it does matter. Recent research from the UK directly linked the increase in administrative burden on GPs to a fall in patient satisfaction with their general practice experience, and we haven’t even mentioned what it does to the GP’s satisfaction.
In a perfect world, services such as these would be extensively road-tested in general practice before ever seeing the light of day. Rather than creating more barriers, people who develop these processes need to focus on streamlining the conduit role GPs fulfil.
Triple whammies should be confined to NSAIDs, ACE inhibitors and diuretics.
Dr Linda Calabresi is the Editor-in-Chief of The Medical Republic.
Email: linda@medicalrepublic.com.au
