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I haven’t seen AMSA much in the media – how do you plan to increase our domestic profile? |
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There are two issues here. The first is how many pickups and stories AMSA features in the mainstream media in the first place, and the second is how we use those stories to best effect.
Firstly, our media strategy aims to maximise the chances of our releases being carried by the major news providers. How we do this is through a more timely approach to our releases – we must time them to coincide with other breaking stories or events for greatest impact. They must be concise, well written and truly reflective of AMSA’s goals and policies.
Secondly, we must better use the coverage we do get for most gain. In 2009, AMSA stories were covered in numerous broadsheets and new outlets, including the Australian, ABC, Fairfax papers and others. These stories were on a range of important issues including internship places, international students and rural health issues. However, unless they happened to stumble across the article themselves, most medical students, and even members of Council, would have been unaware of these stories, and that’s why we propose to create an online ‘scrapbook’ record of all the stories we are featured in to help raise awareness among students and the general public of our issues.
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What is this ‘NAP’ thing? Aren’t you just restating the obvious? |
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Fundamentally, the core business of AMSA is advocacy - on behalf of all medical students. In the past, AMSA has adopted an ad hoc approach to advocacy – responding to issues as they emerge without a clear vision for our place as a key health stakeholder. Our plan for advocacy is to set out a plan about what we will do, what issues we will focus on, how we will go about advocacy and who we will contact. By setting clear goals through the NAP, and utilising our proposed standing committee model, we hope to build AMSA into a strong and effective voice in shaping the future of Australia’s health care system.
The NAP highlights the importance of advocacy and our team’s commitment to do it better and drive concrete results on the big issues like internships and international students. The NAP is designed to be an ongoing and dynamic resource to make our advocacy activities faster and more effective. It is designed to be a reservoir of our current policies on the big issues, available for members to see and comment on, with lists of the relevant stakeholders to hand, and what we are doing on the issues. Using this information in conjunction with you our AMSA members, we can set directions at the beginning of each council with objectives and goals and be proactive about our concerns rather than just reactive to problems when they arise. It is a roadmap that we will use to direct our efforts, and it is something that we hope to develop further with your input and ideas. |
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