Dr Nicole Higgins will wrap up her two-year term as college president at the November AGM.
Dr Michael Wright has squeaked out a victory in the RACGP elections, which boasted a higher voter turnout than recent years.
Sydney-based GP Dr Wright has long been the chair of the college’s health system funding and reform expert committee and is also well-known for his work in the medical indemnity space as the chief medical officer at Avant.
The Medical Republic caught up with the president-elect briefly on Friday morning.
“There are challenges ahead, but I’m excited to think about what we, as a profession, can do if we work together in ensuring access to high quality general practice care for our patients and for our practices,” Dr Wright said.
One of the first challenges that he will be dealing with as RACGP president is the aftermath of the Scope of Practice review, which is set to release its final report and implementation plan in October.
The highly anticipated review is expected to recommend expanded scope of practice for nurses, pharmacists and other allied health practitioners.
Recommendations floated in the review’s second consultation paper included opening up the MBS and PBS to non-doctors and allowing allied health to write referrals.
The RACGP has not publicly released its response to this paper.
Speaking to TMR in the campaigning phase of the election, Dr Wright said he would be focusing on any proposed changes through a quality and safety lens.
“It’s crazy to think that we wouldn’t have that as our primary basis on which we look at these recommendations,” he said.
“I think that’s probably where we need to step back and say, ‘look, what are we doing here, how is this improving safety for patients’, and if it’s not doing that, then it’s definitely something that we would have to oppose.”
Related
Dr Wright’s win was relatively narrow; in the popular vote, the gap between Dr Wright and current vice president Associate Professor Michael Clements was just 24 votes.
After preferences, this gap grew to 109 votes.
There were a total of 7105 votes cast in the two-week-long election, representing 19.7% of eligible voters.
It’s a rise on voter turnout over the 2022 elections, when about 6450 members – 17% of the voting membership – participated.
At that election, Melbourne GP Dr Chris Irwin won the popular vote by about 200 but lost to current president Dr Nicole Higgins on preferences.
Dr Wright will officially take up the presidential role at the conclusion of the RACGP annual general meeting on 21 November.
