A meeting with Queensland Health
In his role as Queensland Chairman of the Australian Society of Orthopaedic Surgeons, Dr Kenneth Cutbush met with Queensland Health's head of human resources.
Representative roles of this kind concern the conditions under which surgeons work in the public system, including staffing and the arrangements that determine how many patients can be treated.
What the Australian Society of Orthopaedic Surgeons does
The Society is a representative body for orthopaedic surgeons, concerned with the circumstances in which they practise rather than with training or examination, which belong to the College and to the Australian Orthopaedic Association. Its work covers how orthopaedic services are funded and organised, how surgeons are engaged by hospitals and by insurers, workforce questions, and the terms on which public and private practice operate. State chairmen handle the dealings with their own state health department, since most of the decisions that affect how a public orthopaedic unit runs are made at state level.
Why staffing arrangements affect patients
The number of operations a public hospital can perform is set by the resources available to do them: operating theatre sessions, surgeons, anaesthetists, nursing staff, ward beds and the capacity to see patients in clinic both before and after surgery. Orthopaedics is one of the larger surgical workloads in any hospital, and it has an additional complication in that it covers both trauma, which cannot be deferred, and planned joint and soft tissue surgery, which can. The two compete for the same theatre time, and when trauma volume rises the planned operating lists are the part that gives way. Staffing and rostering arrangements therefore translate fairly directly into how long people wait.
Where representative work fits
This kind of work consists largely of committee meetings, submissions and negotiation with health departments and funders, and it is done in addition to a full clinical practice rather than instead of it. Surgeons take it on because the decisions being made determine the conditions in which they will be treating patients for years afterwards, and because a department making those decisions needs to hear from the people who run the lists. Individual results vary.