Everything you need to know about continuing professional development, and how not to be a knob about it.
Hello everyone.
This is Julia.
Julia is a GP. She’s been a GP for over 20 years.
Which means she’s passed a lot of exams and she knows an awful lot of medicine.
Look at all the different bits of her brain where she stores her medicine!
Julia is a very good doctor. Her patients love her and she prides herself in her work.
But Julia is very busy. She sees 40 patients a day and then has to stay behind to complete lots of paperwork.
At the end of it all she feels batshit crazy.
But being a diligent, hard-working empathic doctor isn’t enough these days … she now has to prove it!
Julia thinks that all this CPD business must have been made up by a group of out-of touch bureaucrats.
Bureaucrats are people who enjoy folding up bits of paper and telling other people what to do. They enjoy telling people what to do because they’re not getting enough sex.
Here they are talking about how they can bolster this year’s CPD dashboard while complaining about how little sex they’re getting.
Not everyone is as unenthusiastic as Julia, though.
Julia has a colleague called John.
John is the opposite of Julia. He is very “college facing”. He enjoys waving his arms around and saying fancy things like “I must diligently collate portfolios of robust quality improvement evidence” and “this morning I am meta-integrating collegiate recommendations with significant event analyses”.
Here he is being clever!
No one can understand what John is saying.
John tells Julia that she has to stop complaining, roll up her sleeves and get her ducks in a row.
After speaking with John, Julia has a total migraine.
If Julia and John were around 500 years ago John would be called a zealot. Gripped by religiosity and blind faith John would set out with his bright sword to do his master’s bidding.
In fact, if medical institutions like AHPRA and the RACGP were a church then John would be their John of Arc.
This is John waggling his sword around. He thinks he’s fighting for truth and the betterment of patients when in reality he’s just a prick in a pair of tights.
Julia goes home nursing her migraine. She knows that if there are enough people like John around then things will only get worse and next year she’ll have to do a hundred hours of CPD and three audits.
She drinks her special forgetting juice, listens to Norman Pain and prays that the devil reaches out of the earth and takes John away.
