Hi everyone
In case you have not heard or had your say about the proposal to form a new digital and health informatics organisation for Australasia, you can provide your thoughts and comments, see below. Consultation is not limited to ACHI and HISA members and fellows and having input from New Zealand is important.
HISA and ACHI members and Fellows, stakeholders and the wider digital health community have until 25 June to provide feedback on a proposal to unite and form a new digital health and health informatics organisation for Australasia. Consultation is open for everyone until 25 June. The survey is anonymous. The answers you provide will be shared in aggregate form exclusively with the HISA Board and ACHI Council to assist in forming a detailed proposal for members to vote on later in 2019 and to inform our strategic objectives. No individual responses will be published.
Update on what happens after consultation?
The ACHI Council and the HISA Board have scheduled a workshop in Melbourne in early July to discuss consultation feedback.
All of the survey responses, along with feedback received in various other channels, will be reviewed so progress can be made on the following:
• Immediate logistics including the required voting process by HISA and ACHI members and Fellows;
• Confirmation of the form of material for members to vote on;
• Discussions around feedback received on key areas of governance including organisational models.
Stay informed: Look out for a further email update soon after the joint workshop.
If you any questions about this, please ask Karolyn Kerr or myself, or any member/fellow of ACHI or email consultation@hisa.org.au.
Personally I like that we have a single professional body in NZ- will be interesting to see if they retain the fellowship model- and is that something we want to have in NZ?
Hi Karen
ACHI covers NZ as our current fellowship model so we in NZ will have to decide either to stay with the new organisation, and hence our voice is important, or do something on own own. Looking at the clinical colleges and their fellowship models, some are NZ, some are Australasian. Logistics and infrastructure support to run a professional college significantly depend on numbers so maybe we should discuss our options in this space.
Fellowship is a concept that works well for the doctors and their processes for registration or professional recognition. What would work equally well for Allied Health or Nursing so their Health Informatics expertise is similarly recognized with their employers or professional bodies?
ACHI fellowship models the fellowship concept as outlined by Grieg but is open to people from any clinical and non-clinical discipline.
It is based on health informatics expertise/experience. It does not yet link to registration in the traditional sense of the Medical Council, Nursing Council, etc but this aspect of regulation is something we could also explore.
Fellowship also works for nursing. Not sure how employers view it though because in my experience tall poppy nurses are cut down by their colleagues (sorry, but it’s a global phenomenon that we should take out, examine, and decide to stop doing).
My chief concern is what it means for HiNZ and our academic HI community. Our NZ academic colleagues may find themselves falling into a crack between organisations, and we can’t let that happen.
Additionally, it would be nice to see the whole Australia / NZ HI community connected on a single Discourse instance. This could unify the existing ACHI/academic and HISA divide nicely as well as connect us all.
I totally agree with you Nathan. We need to create a community that embraces our diversity as a strength, so we can’t leave anyone behind as we build the future. The contribution from academia is critical to our community.
Having played in various trans Tasman forums, however I would argue, lets start closer to home and build something that makes sense in NZ first. It is both more likely to end well and actually achieve something.
For NZ, this consultation is more about the future relevance of ACHI within the Health Informatics community that we are building.
To achieve a critical mass other colleges in the past have, around their formation, had grandfather provisions to harness older HCP’s who have been working in a particular field for many years so their joint wisdom is not lost. Just saying.