Golden Enemas: for service to general practice

Each year a carnival of bad ideas comes along and threatens to derail general practice. And this year was a doozy.

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The Golden Enema Awards aim to recognise and celebrate the best of the worst ideas of 2022.  

This years’ runners up are: 

Queensland, for pharmacy prescribing 

Who needs a medical degree to diagnose and treat patients? Apparently pharmacists don’t! This idea is as clever as asking your accountant to repoint your roof or taking your car to the vet. 

AHPRA, for the name-and-shame law 

Amendments to the National Law will allow regulators to name and shame doctors while they are still under investigation.  

With this powerful idea AHPRA reverses the notion of innocent until proven guilty. From an ethical standpoint it’s like writing the word “guilty” on a wrecking ball and then using it to smash up a convent full of kittens.  

Labor, for urgent care clinics  

If you can’t fund and staff general practice then why not create urgent care clinics, so you can’t fund and staff them too!  

All three runners up will receive a well thumbed copy of the 2012 edition of the Australian Medicines Handbook signed by Professor Candid himself.  

This year, second place was awarded to:  

AHPRA and the Medical Board, for 50 hours of CPD  

Hugely unpopular and without a scrap of evidence that it improves standards, 50 hours of CPD will push a lot of doctors over the edge – just the firm shove in the back that an already denigrated and demoralised profession needed.  

Not only will the people who dreamed this up get a copy of the AMH, they will also get a spare drawer for storing their terrible ideas

and a state-of-the-art alarm clock, so they can get up early to complete their audits.  

And the Golden Enema for 2022 goes to:

The Medicare rorting beatup   

First prize goes to the unfounded allegation that doctors are annually rorting some large proportion of the $8 billion supposedly lost from Medicare.               

“If general practice is a tea room full of grannies then this idea is an enormous tank driven at full tilt through the tea shop, with the result that the tea shop gets smashed to shit and the tank gets covered in jam,” said Professor Candid. 

Congratulations to the winners, who will receive their golden enema kits in the post.