GPs Down Under has launched a new website promoting its 2018 conference, which looks set to become the web home of the, thus far, mainly Facebook community
GPs Down Under has launched a new website promoting its 2018 conference which looks set to become the web home of the, thus far, mainly Facebook community.
In the typical style of this grass-roots online community doctor group, the site is quite a departure from most of the medical websites out there for doctors in Australia. And in a departure from their Facebook home, which is among the most engaged private online professional communities in Australia, GPDU has chosen to open up the site and its conference to all healthcare professionals.
GPDU program committee chair Dr Karen Price told The Medical Republic (which is helping GPDU organise the conference), that she hoped the site and the conference would help foster new networks and relationships between GPs and the various and vital allied health services that GPs are coming to rely on so much these days, especially in the provision of chronic care management services to their patients.
“Our 2018 conference is quite deliberately open to all healthcare professionals and it, and our site, are going to serve an important, but different, role to our Facebook community,” Dr Price told TMR.
“The Facebook community is very deliberately GP and Registrar only, and it is very carefully audited and monitored because this gives our members confidence that their conversations and communications are very strictly doctor-to-doctor in a general practice context. We think staying strongly GP private on our Facebook offering is important for the group to be able to have rapid clinical information exchanges with confidence and to have robust conversations.”
But in the development of the new site and the conference, GPDU is seeking to acknowledge how important a GPs external healthcare provider networks are to their professional life.
So far, the site mainly features material on the upcoming conference next year on the Gold Coast (May 30 to June 1 at Royal Pines).
Key themes include:
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- Training doctors today for a future we know we don’t yet fully understand
- Resilience, empathy and the role of leadership skills in navigating the future of training and learning
- Health care homes, medical homes and the future of funding
- The after-life of after hours
- Peer support and advocacy networks for doctors
- Managing dangerous patients
- GP medical emergencies
- Opiates, other addictive drugs and patient management
- Practical approaches to using evidence-based medicine in pratice
GPDU18 tickets are on sale now on the site.
Dr Price said that given the degree of difficulty on predicting the financials of the first conference, GPDU had done everything it could to keep the prices low so as many healthcare professionals as feasible could access the event.
The early bird price for GPs, whether a GPDU member or not, is just $685, which for a three-day GP event is well below most conference averages. The registrar early bird is $545.
The program managers also have a small discretionary scheme to help fund registrars who can’t afford to come, but have a great pitch for the program managers to attend (The early bird registrar price is $545).
Dr Price said the site and the conference were a bit of step outwards for GPDU, but if the site went well they would look at copying all the clinical learnings that sit inside the Facebook group, but which were hard inside Facebook to rapidly search and use day to day, and posting them all to the website with appropriate indexing so all that information became more broadly useful.
“Certainly the site will be hosting a lot of material from the GPDU18 conference, including all our PechaKucha and Abstract Abstract entries, and video of the best sessions at the event,” Dr Price said.
The new site can be accessed HERE. Or at the URL www.gpdu.com.au
