Over the last decade, AMSA has evolved, becoming a more professional advocacy body for all Australian Medical Students. We have seen an exponential increase in the representation that we do to Governments, health stakeholders, tertiary education stakeholders and other groups.

 
With greater student numbers nationwide and a larger executive and AMSA Council, we have also seen a rise in the number and breadth of issues AMSA deals with. Not only do we advocate on issues directly relevant to medical student education and training, AMSA has built for itself a strong and well-respected voice on issues as diverse as workforce planning and reform, global health and health policy.

While AMSA has had past successes in achieving change in some of our ‘big issues’, we are becoming ever more reactive to some of the fast-paced health reforms occurring at the moment. News remains in the public arena a few days at best and AMSA must be quick to respond if it is to be heard. AMSA needs to be on the front foot pushing our agenda and our National Advocacy Plan (NAP) is a document outlining how we would pro-actively approach our core-business of advocacy.

We plan to get more ‘bang for our buck’ when it comes to advocacy, and achieve concrete results on relevant issues like internship positions and international students. Policy isn’t developed just for fun - it must be aimed at delivering tangible results and the NAP represents how our executive will translate Council’s policy into action.

The NAP is neither a policy document nor a complete or proscriptive list of issues we will focus on – that will remain for Council to decide. Rather, it is a strategic plan for advocacy that shows how we will go about implementing Council’s decisions. It contains some background on the issues, what we will do about them and who we will contact to do it. 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.

We recognise that many issues pertinent to AMSA are heavily State or Territory based, and we will modify our approach to each individual jurisdiction. Naturally, we will work alongside local MedSocs and Medical Student Councils to our mutual advantage.
Also important to our NAP is a Public Relations Strategy. AMSA has pushed into the mainstream media several times in the last few years, and we hope to build this public profile even more. We will target our media releases better to maximise media pick-ups as well as include on our website all the articles, op-eds and letters we have had published (many of which not even council members were aware of).

Building new external partnerships is another part of our plan to grow our organisation and image. We see significant scope to work with like-minded Australian (like Beyond Blue) and international organisations in developing policy and co-promoting and co-running events or initiatives. Already, we have been consulting with a number of NGOs, student and youth organisations such as World Vision and GetUp, to identify projects and areas where we can work together because we strongly feel that AMSA has both a lot to gain and a lot to give.