| President's Letter |
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Dear Tiffany, AMSA Executive and AMSA Councillors,
Our bid is a collaborative and inclusive team made up of passionate students from a number of universities. We have a great mix of people who represent the breath of Australian medical students – young men and women, undergraduate & postgraduate, rural & metropolitan, domestic & international.
One of the key focuses of our bid is advocacy. We see this as fundamentally AMSA’s core purpose and advancing the best interests of all Australian medical students is something that we do not take lightly. We recognise that our health care system and the landscape of tertiary education are currently in a period of significant change and reform – we must take advantage of this change. A strong and effective voice for medical students is needed like never before.
We can’t sit back and respond to problems as they emerge – we must effectively and vocally advocate for a system that meets our needs as students and future medical practitioners. We have therefore developed a framework that will not only help us guide the direction of our advocacy efforts, but also to help implement it so that we can achieve real change.
As part of our bid therefore, we have drafted a National Advocacy Plan (NAP) which is a manifesto on what we see as some of AMSA’s key challenges and how we will go about addressing them. This is a brief guide on some of the issues we will tackle, who the key stakeholders are and some of the ways we’ll go about it. This doesn’t mean we won’t be advocating on other issues, and of course, AMSA Council will remain the ultimate arbiter of AMSA policy direction. We use the NAP to illustrate our approach to advocacy and as a tool to assist rapid advocacy action next year.
Advocacy and policy development must be a collaborative process involving more than just the Vice Presidents of the Association. We propose several internal reforms to help us maximise our external impact and internal effectiveness, including the introduction of specialised Standing Committees of AMSA Council, which will involve AMSA reps and others directly in the advocacy process.
A second core plank of our bid is grassroots student development. When students with similar interests and aims get together on a local level, they can do amazing things, and when they are linked in with other students on a national level, that impact is multiplied further. Recent successes are the Global Health Groups, linking in with the Global Health Network, the General Practice Students Network and the related Rural Health Clubs and the NRHSN. One of our plans looks at facilitating these successful networks in a number of other issues, in our AMSA Interest Groups (AIG) plan. This plan aims to connect, and even start, groups in such areas as Surgery, Military Medicine, Gay, Lesbian, Bisexual, Transgender groups etc.
A third focus of our team is maintaining the long term stability and prosperity of the organisation financially and externally. Our team’s executive and management experience means we are well placed to identify what expenses we can reduce and which ones add value to the association. We have relationships and access to many existing and prospective sponsors and will create a proper business plan to make us more attractive to them. We will also have better access to the numerous Government grants on offer.
Furthermore, communication, between all the different parts of AMSA – its executive, Council, members and the general public, is vital for not only the day-to-day running of the organisation, but also in building our profile among externals and our own members. To help redress some of the apathy and misconceptions about AMSA out there, we have developed a range of measures to improve the way we target and deliver our messages and seek and receive feedback.
We have secured the support of the AMA (NSW), which will provide us with gratis office and storage space, internet, telephone, photocopying and fax facilities. These are the same offices provided to the 2009 team so there would also be no costs associated with relocating.
In preparing this bid, we have consulted with current and former AMSA Presidents, executives, Councillors as well as MedSoc Presidents, external stakeholders and anyone else who’ll listen! Our plans and policies have been developed and tweaked with the help of their ideas, and we believe the plans we have are attainable and sustainable.
It is a great personal privilege to have been chosen to lead such a talented and dedicated group of students and in recognition of the significant demands of the role of President I will completely defer my medical studies if our team is successful. I strongly believe AMSA deserves a full-time leader unencumbered by the demands of medical school or research, and in the financial interest of the Association, I will not seek the President’s honorarium or any ute donations.
I invite you to get in touch with me or any one of our team if you have any questions or comments about our plans or candidates. I look forward to catching up with everyone in October!
Yours sincerely, Christopher Mulligan AMSA Presidential Candidate, 2010
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