The team from AMA Victoria wishes you all the best as you commence your career as a doctor.

At a time of excitement and anticipation, know that you are ready and that AMA Victoria will support you. We look forward to being there for you in your first year as a doctor.
 

Tips and advice for interns: know your rights and keep a work diary

Know your rights
It is important that you know where to find the ‘rules of engagement’ or ‘terms and conditions’ for your workplace. These are made up of workplace policies, contracts, Enterprise Agreements or Legislation. A great place to start to get to know your terms and conditions is the AMA/ASMOF Enterprise Agreement. It is a big document and so you may not want/have time to read the whole thing, we have attached the contents page of the DiT agreement as a reference. You will see from the document that there is a huge number of entitlements that you may not have realised you have. We suggest keeping a copy of this document to refer to when you want to know if you have a workplace right on a particular issue. The full agreement is available on the AMA website here.

Keep a work diary
It is a good practice from day one of your career in medicine to keep a work diary, it can be electronic or paper based, whatever works for you. Do not rely on your memory, it has got a lot to process and manage and is often not a reliable source of detail when it comes to dates, times, place, people and context.  Often something will happen at work that you may want to refer back to at a later date. It could be something positive or negative and it is good to get into the habit of noting these things down for future reference – you may want to raise an issue or address a complaint or a performance rating, or to prepare for your next application or an interview process. Regardless of the reason it is immensely powerful to have contemporary notes of an event to refresh your memory, or if needed to show a third person, rather than relying on your memory alone.