At the ripe old age of 50, AMSA Council has finally left behind those awkward years of adolescence and matured into the premiere forum for medical students across the country to discuss and debate their issues. However, given how much it has grown and changed, Council isn’t as efficient as it once was, and must adapt to meet a new set of challenges. Through our extensive experience in AMSA Council, we have built a plan of reform that will keep both the executive and Council dynamic, productive and accountable.

Standing Committees

A key structural reform we will implement is the introduction of formalised Standing Committees to tackle AMSA’s most pertinent issues head on. The Standing Committees (SCs) will be single-issue task-forces charged with the development and implementation of specific policy areas. They will broaden and deepen what AMSA is able to achieve, and will be a more effective way of dealing with certain issues than a single executive portfolio.

The SCs will be small working groups of Councillors, executive and even other AMSA members not on Council who can continue policy development, planning and execution throughout the entire year rather than limiting this to just three face-to-face meetings. This framework allows for more hands to make lighter work and also opens up policy development and implementation up to more opinions and ideas.

Initially, we propose two standing committees in response to two of AMSA’s key policy challenges:

• Standing Committee on International Students’ Affairs - we believe such a standing committee is better placed than an individual executive portfolio to deal with international student issues given the huge workload and differing issues facing different groups and demographics of international students. A group made up of students with varied experiences, concerns, skills and origins will be far more representative and effective than a single voice and be better able to prepare better researched policy and submissions.

• Standing Committee on Governmental Affairs – Such a group would be tasked with absorbing and responding to many of the governmental reports and reforms in progress. It would include representatives from a number of states and be focused on dealing with issues from the various Departments of Health and Education.

The SCs will work semi-autonomously and would be chaired by a member of the executive and would report their progress to each AMSA Council meeting. These students will be chosen by a simple application process based on experience, submitted as a CV and letter of motivation. By including not only executive and Councillors, but other well-informed students outside the AMSA-fold, we can address some of the unfounded criticisms that AMSA is overly ‘cliquey’ and better tap the talent within the 13,500 strong medical school community. The SCs will communicate electronically, via Huddle and Teleconference and would not pose a significant cost-burden. The SC model is flexible - they can be created, or change their Terms of Reference as needs dictate.

Internal Management

The internal communication modalities and portfolio responsibilities of the AMSA executive are definitely not the best ice-breaker topics to impress those of the opposite gender at parties (we’ve tried), but they are crucial to everything AMSA does. We have a unique perspective on what works and what doesn’t when it comes to internal executive management, and have developed clear plans to improve it.

One of these will be to redesign the role and focus of the Membership Officer (MO). As a new position in 2009, it will benefit from further clarification and detailed programmatic specificity. We have chosen to integrate our MO in Canberra to make better use of the National Secretariat.

Our revised MO will:

• Improve communication between AMSA executive and the Secretariat to foster mutual support and allow greater efficiency. This means weekly face-to-face meetings between the MO and the Secretariat.

• Better distribute the workload between the MO, executive and Secretariat to free up the latter for strategic and long term goals.

• Ensure the longer-term sustainability of integrating an executive member with the Secretariat by working towards employing an administrative staff.

• Assume responsibility of ‘local issue’ advocacy (addressed in the NAP). The MO will make the AMSA executive more accessible to individual student issues.

• Along with the CLO, be responsible for the implementation and ongoing management of AIGs.

• Give our executive direct access to the Federal Government and ACT-based national organisations such as the AMA through a Canberra-based executive member. This will reduce costs currently spent on external representation.

• Be responsible for NLDS, with easier access to Parliamentarians, the National Secretariat and local knowledge of Canberra.

Executive Management