Medical Consumers Association News Page

E V E N T S / N E W S

Text of slide presentation:IIR Rural and Remote health Care Conference 29 Aug 2002

MCA invited to contribute to UOW Initiative on e-Health

November 25 : The University of Wollongong is starting an Initiative for e-Health within its School of Information Technology and Computer Science. MCA was invited to attend the inaugural Advisory Board Workshop that was held at the Novotel Darling Harbour.
The MCA Secretary provided copies of the current MCA newsletter in support of the view that the shift to the wider use of IT systems in health care delivery and the emergence of the EHR (electronic health record ) represented a massive opportunity for medical consumers to take better control of their health. Further that if the right types of IT systems were introduced an outcome would be the empowerment of consumers to provide corrective feedback via next generation QI (quality improvement) IT based systems, so making health care delivery systems safer for patients and more aware of consumer need.
The MCA secretary also noted that at the heart of today's medical services crisis was the fact that neither Medicine or Law provided any warranty on their products and services. Rather the more unsafe such products were the larger became the market for such products, as the customer became trapped, having to purchase even more services in the hope of eventually finding a way out of a medico-legal maze they found themselves trapped within. And that current directions by government (such as the Health Care Liability Act in NSW) flew in the face of the total systems approach needed if health care delivery is to be optimised. Such regressive legislation addresses the problem of the courts placing a high value on human life and suffering by putting legal barriers in place that reduce the cash value of human life and suffering by cost shifting the real human costs of failed and/or negligent medical/legal service supply out to the social welfare budget.
Addressing the tricky problem of how IT systems could be justified, and what metrics could be used to measure outcomes, the MCA secretary proposed the view that a model of good fit for medical service supply was the battlefield, where chaos was the reality and that IT systems could bring standardisation and a basis for better DM (decision making) that should lead to safer health care. And thus a measure of the success of a new IM&T system could be viewed as the extent to which its introduction had reduced the total entropy of an extended health care system.

New MCA Committee elected at AGM

November 24 : More use of the Internet suggested at MCA's AGM, with a planning meeting about this to take place in early 2003.

Changes to NSW Associations Act

June 25 : MCA has now received a letter from the NSW Department of Fair Trading to inform us that public liability cover is no longer compulsory for incorporated associations in NSW.

Thus we now have to make a choice if we retain such cover or not and if we wish to retain some such cover how much we should seek to retain. In view of the very massive increases in premiums for such cover expected the removal of the compulsory requirement is a most important matter for MCA.

The letter also notes that the Department is examining the operation of the Associations Incorporation Act 1984 later this year and will be seeking comments from Associations..

MCA needs to have a special meeting to allow members to look at the issues raised by this letter and provide comment and come to a conclusion on what to do. (As public liability cover is currently our biggest budget item if we can save on this without exposing MCA to unreasonable risks it opens up various possibilities.)

IMPORTANT UPDATE !

August 20: Owing to pressure of NSW Health GAP committee work plus work on members cases, preparation of newsletters has had to be delayed. ( If any members can offer assistance to fill gaps in effort please contact the Secretary.) The revised plan now is to post out two editions of the newsletter towards start of September with notice of a meeting planned for mid September. This meeting will be held in central Sydney and involve a visit to the Health Information Service at the State Library of NSW.

MCA Secretary contact details:
(EMail aamca@sydpcug.org.au or by phone Sydney 9949 6531)

Public Hearing June 2002

Parliamentary Committee to the HCCC: Inquiry Into The Procedures Followed During Investigations And Prosecutions Undertaken By The HCCC

Details of what took place at the public hearing on 19 June when the HCCC gave evidence.

Details of what took place at the public part of the hearing on 27 June when the NSW Medical Board give evidence.

The Parliamentary Committee also sent MCA a copy of the submission made by the HCCC to this inquiry and we can thus provide a synopsis of our understanding of key elements of the HCCC's submission.

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