The RACGP might benefit from offering a variety of membership options, allowing doctors to remain with the college, while seeking their CPD administration elsewhere.
GPs say they would prefer a cheaper CPD provider, but a significant proportion would not consider abandoning their membership with the RACGP or ACRRM.
An online survey by Healthed of more than 600 GPs and GP registrars on Tuesday found that money talks: only 12% said they would continue using the RACGP or ACCRM as their “CPD home” if there were a substantially cheaper option.
They were asked: “Currently, only the RACGP and ACRRM can administer your CPD points so that you can remain registered and qualify for higher Medicare rebates. Next year, it will be possible to do this through other providers, known as ‘CPD Homes’. [If] you could get a CPD Home to administer your CPD points in the same way but for less than HALF the cost of what you are currently paying the RACGP/ACRRM for the same service, how likely are you to
1) use the cheaper alternative CPD home for your CPD administration
2) seriously consider not renewing your RACGP/ACRRM membership?”
The majority of GPs sampled said they were either “very likely” (36%) or “somewhat likely” (22%) to use a cheaper alternative for the ongoing administration and allocation of their CPD points.
The legislation cuts out the administrative role that the colleges play in certifying to Services Australia that every GP has met their CPD requirements.
Fulfilling CPD requirements is mandated for a GP’s patients to receive the higher Medicare rebate rate.
The changes mean that GP colleges will only be able to accredit CPD and set standards for GPs who chose them as their CPD home. Other organisations are likely to compete with them for members by undercutting the colleges’ steep fees.
But Associate Professor Charlotte Hespe, a Sydney-based GP, practice owner, and chair of the NSW and ACT RACGP faculties said that changing CPD provider may not be that simple.
“If you think it’s going to be easy to manage CPD yourself and deliver all the requirements to the AMC, I think you’ll soon realise that you’ll still need a provider that does that for you,” she said in an interview on The Medical Republic podcast.
In the event of the legislation passing, more than a quarter of GPs surveyed said they would consider abandoning their RACGP or ACRRM membership, while 30% were undecided.
But 43% said they would not consider ending their membership with the RACGP or ACRRM, even if the colleges were no longer the most affordable option for offering CPD administration. (In the survey’s exact wording, 27% were “very unlikely” and 16% were “unlikely” to “seriously consider not renewing your membership”).
The survey results imply that the RACGP might benefit from offering a variety of membership options, allowing doctors to remain with the college for reasons such as professional prestige and community, while seeking their CPD administration elsewhere.
New CEO of the RACGP Dr Matthew Miles, said that while looking at tiered membership options wasn’t off the table, there were no details to share at this stage.
“It’s such an important time to be attached and engaged with the college and with so much uncertainty in the world and with so much fear and anxiety trying to operate in a COVID environment, you would just assume that most people would want to retain that connection to the RACGP,” he told The Medical Republic.
Dr Miles said that from the perspective of the RACGP, the solution would be to offer a membership that doesn’t revolve around one product, but instead offers GPs an entire suite of member benefits.
