Letter to Medical Observer.

The Medical Observer featured my letter to the Editor in the edition of March 28. This is what I said:

Dear Editor,

The GP workforce issue has been recently reinforced with a vengeance for me, as you highlighted in your article last week. My practice is in a designated ‘Inner Metropolitan’ area of Mr. Rudd’s electorate of Griffith. Once upon a time this little shopping precinct had eight busy doctors, in a few weeks time there will be two. I am sixty years old and have no succession plan for my practice. I admit to completely giving up trying to find a solution to the problem two years ago.

I have been shaken out of my resigned, cynical sloth by the loyalty and support of patients and locals, who are enthusiastically researching the issue, coming up with ideas, and signing a petition.

We do not need any more statistics: any further government recourse to data-collecting is avoidance behaviour, pure and simple. We resent the patronising reassurances from government (and our own professional bodies) that ‘we understand the problem’. We would laugh at the proposed ‘solutions’ such as Super Clinics if they were not so fundamentally flawed as to be tragic.

We all want this problem solved. It will not be solved without a determinedly problem-solving attitude and genuinely open, vigorously creative debate in which we and our patients are involved. It will most certainly not be solved by bureaucrats. We want to get the debate going and the ideas flowing. To that end we now have a blog which we hope will provoke discussion and stimulate ideas. It is at http://needmoregps.blogspot.com/ , and we invite your comments and input.

Yours sincerely,

Dr Janet Clarkson,
Logan Road General Practice
Stones Corner
Brisbane 4120