The Australian Medical Association (AMA) and associated stakeholders have launched a booklet to give us ‘Informed Financial Consent’ in a collaboration between doctors and patients.
If you’re flat on your back in the emergency ward the last thing you’ll be contemplating is being ‘informed’ about anything other than the fixing and nothing about trying to understand the consequences of the phalanx of doctors asking a myriad of questions.
Been there, done that!
But the system needs help.
The enormous amounts of money promised by the politicians and the utter confusion for those needing to be ’informed’ makes this little booklet necessary but there’s more to the equation than the booklet explains.
Dr Tony Bartone is the current Federal President of the AMA and he spoke to the National Press Club in Canberra last week with a far reaching “Enough talking – time for action on long term health policy vision”, but it’s at the grass roots level that most of us question the way the system works and what is the best way forward.
With a room full of medicos, a large group from the Department of Health and the ACT’s Health Directorate on hand, it was a way for the AMA to state their case, as well as to those of us in the mature age cohort, contemplating ageing and the impending nasties that always rear their ugly head when we least expect them.
