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Professor Des Gorman is the Head of the University of Auckland’s School of Medicine. He is the first graduate of the School to hold this position and has a personal professorial chair in medicine. Professor Des Gorman will be talking on the Role of the Doctor of the Future.

The ability of Australasian Governments to identify, fund and deliver desirable health services will be increasingly challenged by an ageing population, escalating costs of health-related technology and by increasing consumer expectations.

The status quo of local health systems is characterised by a variously maldistributed health workforce, slow, isolated and poorly adaptive training programs, and consequential inequities in health access and quality.

Reform is essential if even the current modest standards of care are to be maintained. It is unlikely that these future challenges will be adequately addressed by attempts to compress morbidity in later life and those to increase either the productivity of extant practitioners or to increase the percentage of the community involved in providing health care. Instead, and contingent upon sustainable and non-secular funding models, greater utility can be expected from a better alignment of the health and education systems with each other and patient care needs, and, from the innovative disruption of current models of health service.

Any consequential health system planning must be predicated on the intrinsic uncertainly in identifying and measuring “demand and supply”. There is a pragmatic case for beginning the health service planning cycle by explicitly defining the role of the doctor in the future. Given the lead time to train and deploy, this debate is already overdue.

• Venue: MEU, Edward Ford Building, The University of Sydney
• Date: Wednesday 18th June 2008
• Time: 10.00am-12.00pm
• Cost: Nil
• Contact: Jacqueline Wells
  

As part of an international visiting fellowship at the University of Sydney, Dr Lynn Knight will facilitate a colloquium focusing on narrative research in health and social services professional education. This event follows from the colloquium titled “Qualitative research in health and social services professional education: marrying theory, methods and practice” that she facilitated earlier this year along with host researcher, Associate Professor Charlotte Rees (OPME, Faculty of Medicine, The University of Sydney). The present colloquium will be of particular interest to qualitative researchers within health professional education but will also be of interest to narrative researchers from the social sciences (novice and experienced alike). It will begin with a similar preface to the first colloquium by highlighting the importance of marrying theory, methodology and practice in social sciences research. The primary focus of the morning, however, will be to introduce the longitudinal audio diary method for the collection of personal incident narratives (PINs) and highlight ways in which these PINs can be analyzed to inform researchers interested in identity formation. The afternoon will be devoted to developing participants’ skills in the analysis of such narratives.

The first one-day event was held in February 2008 with an audience of over 40 local, interstate and international visitors, with a diverse background and mixed range of experience in qualitative research. The evaluation was extremely positive, with delegates finding the day well organized, well structured, informative, enjoyable and useful. They also appreciated the delegate pack, which included plenary, and workshop handouts and references. The delegates particularly enjoyed new insights into the richness, breadth and depth of qualitative data analysis: “The depth of analysis that can be applied to only a few lines of data has brought me to look more carefully at my data”. While the delegates welcomed the high levels of interaction and participation in these workshops, a number of people commented that the workshops needed more time. Therefore, the current colloquium has been developed to provide a more focused and in-depth experience of working with narrative data. People attending the first event in February interested in further developing their understanding and skills of narrative analysis are welcome at this event at a reduced rate (Contact: jwells@med.usyd.edu.au for full evaluation results of the February event).

• Venue: Darlington Centre, The University of Sydney
• Date: Thursday 17th July 2008
• Time: 8.30am-5.00pm
• Cost: $240 inc. GST (reduced rate of $150 for PhD students and delegates from the February workshop)
  (University of Sydney employees who choose to pay via journal transfer will not be charged the GST)
• Contact: Jacqueline Wells