Our advocacy priorities for 2024-25 focus on the theme of "Restoring Confidence: Practical Solutions to Address Victoria's Healthcare System Challenges." These priorities build upon the initiatives we have been pursuing since May 2023. AMAV President, Dr Jill Tomlinson, talks us through them.

“Victorians want a healthcare system that provides quality, accessible safe healthcare. We have lived through unprecedented times, and there is much work to be done to restore confidence and improve workforce morale,” says AMA Victoria’s President, Dr Jill Tomlinson.

“The Victorian healthcare system delivers high quality care, but workforce pressures and the impact of the pandemic has left the medical workforce with low morale and extremely stretched resources. The continued expectation that we can do more with less, the increasing complexity of care, increasing cost of living pressures and access issues are contributing to despair and burnout among doctors.

“General practitioners lament the fragmentation of team-based general practice care by initiatives including pharmacy prescribing and priority primary care clinics, and the challenges of accessibility and affordability for their patients. Psychiatrists experienced significant challenges with communication around the implementation of the Mental Health and Wellbeing Act 2022 and are concerned that care delivery is being limited by workforce and bed constraints despite increasing demand for services. “

AMA Victoria is committed to enhancing Victoria's healthcare system by focusing on key areas including—sustaining general practice, improving public hospitals, advancing digital health, supporting mental health, advocating for progressive public health measures, prioritising rural and regional health, lessening the administrative burdens placed on all medical practitioners, and addressing equity and diversity issues.

Restoring Confidence provides AMAV’s advocacy template for the year ahead. It focuses on three key areas or leading themes (general practice, public health services and mental health), and five contributing themes (digital health and technology, equity and diversity, regional and rural healthcare, administrative burden, public health).

“General practice is the most efficient part of our healthcare system and the workforce and funding crisis in general practice heightens the difficulties of managing patients who have increasingly complex care needs. We desperately need to bolster the general practice workforce through improvements in recruitment and retention; improve accessibility and affordability of quality primary care for Victorians; and reduce avoidable hospital presentations and admissions. We need to improve working conditions for public hospital doctors including in psychiatry, and address recruitment and retention factors, particularly in regional and rural areas.”

“Given the straitened state fiscal climate and the reality that much advocacy in 2024 will be directed at preventing cuts rather than proposing new expenditure, we have deliberately not used the term ‘budget submission’ this year. Instead, we’ve created series of priorities that encapsulates the policy and advocacy initiatives AMAV has been pursuing since May 2023. This deliberately presents nothing we haven’t discussed many times with government,” explains Dr Tomlinson.

"The 2024-25 priorities reinforce our messaging and are supported by many tangible, achievable solutions, which we strongly recommend the Victorian Government take up to resolve persistent issues, improve the healthcare system and usher in a more resilient and responsive era – one that advances a Victorian healthcare system that empowers doctors and enriches patient care.”
 

Advocacy priorities at a glance