Dr Karyn Matterson will lead registrars through the biggest change in decades.
With just 20 days until GP training is handed back to the colleges, the new president of General Practice Registrars Australia is under no illusions about how difficult the process will be.
“There’s going to be teething, hiccups and other challenges that everyone … expects to some degree,” new GPRA president Dr Karyn Matterson told The Medical Republic.
The association, she said, is working with the colleges to nip those problems in the bud.
Based in Brisbane, Dr Matterson did her medical training with the Royal Australian Air Force and was previously a clinical dietician.
From an allied health team member point of view, she said, the holistic elements of general practice were what made it an attractive specialty.
“[As a dietician] I worked closely with general practitioners and saw the value that they added by being the centre of care for their patients,” Dr Matterson said.
As a clinician, she has served on various RACGP and GPRA committees and working groups, primarily focusing on registrar pay and conditions.
Training gets handed back to the colleges on Wednesday, 1 February, and Dr Matterson said there has never been a more critical time in general practice.
“We know that there are less and less GP trainees coming into the system, and GPRA has been actively involved in advocating for better pay conditions for registrars,” she said.
“In tandem with our sister organisation, GPSA, [we’ve been pushing] to improve the whole sphere of training with practice support, supervisor support and support for registrars.”
Dr Matterson acknowledged that there had been general concerns with the transition process in the past but said there had been good progress with both colleges in recent months.
She also encouraged any registrars with concerns about training transition to contact GPRA.
“We strongly advocate … that registrars continue to be able to independently raise issues outside the college structures,” the GPRA president said.
That includes ideas for improvement as well as any issues.
“We don’t know what the full impact of the transition is going to be, but problems that existed prior to the transition are still likely to exist after the transition,” said Dr Matterson.
Separate to managing the training transition, Dr Matterson said she will prioritise support for internationally trained doctors.
“We need immediate and significant reform to ensure that IMGs and the IMG training pathway are supported properly, with the appropriate financial assistance and the appropriate pastoral care to get through their specialty training,” she said.
Other priorities for the association include promoting fair and equitable employment conditions for registrars, as well as promoting general practice as the specialty of choice for trainees.
Pastoral care over the transition is a particular area of focus, given fears among some GPs in training that the shutdown of regional training organisations will result in a huge loss of local knowledge, creating confusion and inefficiency in the system.
In this respect though, registrars need not worry too much.
Of the 900 staff operating the RACGP’s training arm, around 700 have come across from the various RTOs.
The royal college’s chief training officer, Georgina van de Water, is a previous CEO of GP Synergy, the training organisation that covered NSW and the ACT.
ACRRM president Dr Dan Halliday said the rural college had also recruited a number of previous RTO staff.
“In the rural context, we aren’t necessarily comparing apples with apples in terms of college transition,” he told TMR.
“[ACRRM] undertook recruitment processes and filled positions from a wide variety of RTO Workforce Education sector professionals.”
Like Dr Matterson, Dr Halliday is anticipating minor teething issues but feels confident that the transition will go as smoothly as possible.
“We’re trying to be flexible and adaptable and we’re recognising that we haven’t necessarily invested in bricks and mortar, we have invested in people,” he said.
