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President’s Blog: 12-month course in becoming a different doctor
Friday January 24, 2025
The Western Australian health system welcomed more than 400 new interns earlier this month, with week-long orientation programs held across the private and public hospitals. The AMA (WA) was, as is customary, invited to each of the hospitals to contribute to the welcome.
As President I find it an exciting and energising week, but it begins with the challenge of working out what to say to the new doctors that hasn’t been said to them many times before. They know they have to be nice to the nursing staff, print out the lists and review the bloods before ward rounds, and look after themselves as well as their patients.
They will learn plenty during orientation about their hospital’s processes and culture; but how do you put it all together in the broader context of being a member of our great profession? What does internship mean in the life of a doctor?
To me, internship is probably the most important year in the life of a doctor. This is not intended to be anxiety-provoking, as if to suggest that if you don’t thrive as an intern you won’t thrive throughout your career. I don’t believe that at all. I know plenty of excellent doctors who took it pretty easy as interns (I won’t name them here). In fact, the skills that make a great intern aren’t entirely the same as the skills that make a great specialist. Further, some of the personal qualities needed to make a great specialist aren’t tested in internship. The importance of internship is in the amount that you learn, develop and grow, without even necessarily being intentional about it. As I said to most of the new interns, you will be a different doctor at the end of the year from what you are this week. I’m not sure that I could assert that about any other 12-month periods in a doctor’s career.
I also believe that over the past decade or two, internship has taken on new importance in building the links that give our profession its strength in Western Australia. Once a one-university town in which everyone knew everyone else, we now have three excellent medical universities populating our profession, and many doctors from interstate and overseas coming to work in our hospitals. The intensity of internship forces the formation of new friendships and professional relationships between previously unacquainted colleagues, many of which become lifelong. Why is this important? Our profession, and the AMA that represents it, depends critically on the strength that comes from unity to remain our community’s leading advocate for health. This underpins our effectiveness in seeing off many of the incessant attempts by governments and non-medical interests to erode healthcare in the name of cost-cutting or rent-seeking.
So again, we say good luck to the WA interns of 2025, and welcome to the wonderful medical family of AMA (WA)!
