The Thought Broadcast
The Thought Broadcast primarily aims to demystify the Scholarly Project and humanise research by sharing the trainee experience. We will focus on some of the stories behind successful projects, including how the authors came up with ideas and transformed these into published research. Additionally, to complement the podcast series and better support trainees, we will hear from consultant psychiatrists who are experienced in publishing and research, and in supervising and examining the Scholarly Project.
As The Thought Broadcast develops, we hope to expand the podcast to discuss a wide range of research-related content with other trainees and early career psychiatrists. We hope that The Thought Broadcast can be an interactive experience with trainees from across Australia and New Zealand getting involved, and shaping the podcast in the direction that will benefit them the most.
The Thought Broadcast
Psychiatry Training amidst the New South Wales Workforce Crisis: A Panel Discussion at Congress 2025
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This episode of The Thought Broadcast grapples with the ongoing public psychiatry workforce crisis in New South Wales. The discussion covers the roots of the dispute, its current status, and the widespread implications for both patients and doctors. There is particular focus on the impact on those trainees trying to work and learn within this system, including challenges surrounding adequate supervision, increased workloads, and struggling health systems. The episode emphasises the importance for trainees to seek support and concludes with reflections on the necessary steps toward a positive and sustainable resolution, emphasising the urgent need for systemic change. A panel consisting of Dr Pramudie Gunaratne (RANZCP NSW Branch Chair), Dr Kathryn Drew (NSW Branch Training Committee Chair) and Dr Nicole Nahm (NSW trainee) spoke to members of The Thought Broadcast team, Drs Andrew Amos, Yoon Kwon Choi, and Michael Weightman, on 6th May 2025 at the RANZCP Congress.
Music: https://freesound.org/people/ShadyDave/sounds/277375/
Logo: Sidonie Prentice
Disclaimer:
This podcast is provided to you for information purposes only and to provide a broad public understanding of various mental health topics. The podcast may represent the views of the author and not necessarily the views of The Royal Australian and New Zealand College of Psychiatrists ('RANZCP'). The podcast is not to be relied upon as medical advice, or as a substitute for medical advice, does not establish a doctor-patient relationship and should not be a substitute for individual clinical judgement. By accessing The RANZCP's podcasts you also agree to the full terms and conditions of the RANZCP's Website. Expert mental health information and finding a psychiatrist in Australian or New Zealand is available on the RANZCP’s Your Health In Mind Website.
Hello and welcome back to the Thought Broadcast, the trainee-focused podcast from Australasian psychiatry. We try to focus our podcast on topics that matter to trainees, and arguably the biggest issue facing trainees across our two countries at the moment is the workforce crisis that has unfolded in New South Wales. Today we are recording at Congress and are fortunate to be speaking with a panel of psychiatrists and psychiatrists in training from New South Wales to understand more about this issue and particularly how it impacts trainees. My name is Michael Waitman, and I'm joined by two other members of our Thought Broadcast team. I'd like to introduce Andrew Amos and Yoon Kwan Choi. Welcome.
SPEAKER_00Thanks, Michael. Good to be here. Thanks for having us.
SPEAKER_05On our panel today, we have firstly Pramuthi Gunaratne, New South Wales branch chair. Welcome, Pramuthi.
SPEAKER_02Hi Michael, nice to be here.
SPEAKER_05Next we are joined by Catherine Drew, Chair of the Branch Training Committee in New South Wales. Welcome, Catherine. Hi, Michael, thanks. And last but not least, we have Nicole Naam, who is currently training in New South Wales.
SPEAKER_04Hi, nice to be here.
SPEAKER_05Thanks so much for joining us, everyone, today. I wonder if to start with Pramuthy, if you could please give us a brief background on the issues being faced by New South Wales public psychiatrists, particularly for those listeners who are from outside of the state.
SPEAKER_02Yeah, sure. So I guess this is a story that is quite long, but I'll try and make it as brief as possible, going through sort of the key moments. So it probably this started about two years ago in New South Wales. We've had this workforce crisis for many years, but it seemed like things were really escalating. With about a third of psychiatry positions in public mental health were vacant. And so the New South Wales branch received letters from clinical directors around the state. So we had individual clinical directors write to us, but also a joint letter from about 18 clinical directors telling us that they just couldn't recruit staff anymore, they couldn't hold on to their staff, and they didn't know what to do with the services that they had. And so they were asking for the branch to advocate on behalf of psychiatrists and how we could do something in our workforce. And then from there, we went through a journey of advocacy along with Asmoff, the Doctors Union, and the AMA. And we, you know, wrote letters to the minister, we had multiple meetings, so much correspondence back and forth to try and find a solution for this workforce crisis. Unfortunately, we just didn't get much headway in terms of any meaningful solutions. And in terms of trainees, we were also hearing from our trainees that, you know, sometimes people had five supervisors through a six-month rotation because they were constantly getting locum psychiatrists that were doing their training, and that just isn't good when you're thinking about an apprenticeship model of learning psychiatry. And also when we surveyed our trainees, about 80% of stage three trainees in New South Wales Health said that they weren't planning on staying on in public mental health services, which is almost the exact flip of what we would have seen a few years ago, where most trainees would take on a public position as their first position. And so there was a real problem in terms of holding on to staff. Over sort of 18 months of negotiations, when there didn't seem to be any movement, the union had this idea around we were already seeing resignations happen. So this idea of kind of a mass resignation, which was something that had been done in Queensland a number of years ago and South Australia. And so that's how the idea came about to try and push for the government to be able to actually address the workforce crisis. And then there was a whole lot of you know complicated things that happened with the Industrial Relations Commission where our union was taken out and they weren't able to advocate on behalf of psychiatrists. And then at the 11th hour, when there were all these resignations already in, letters already in, the government came forward with their solution, was what they called an efficiencies trial or a productivity trial, which had this three-pronged plan. And essentially it was around having more cuts in the mental health system in order to be able to fund a pay rise. And most psychiatrists in New South Wales just thought that was unethical, that this is an already depleted system, and to be able to have more cuts as a way of funding a pay rise when actually what we were asking for was more investment in the system and also more investment in psychiatrists. And so that was like the straw that broke the camel's back. This was in late December that this happened. And after that, we saw this huge movement towards about, I think there are between 260 to 290 psychiatrists in in New South Wales in the public sector. There should be up to 400. And out of those 260 to 290, 207 uh put in a resignation letter. So it was pretty much catastrophic for the mental health system. But even with that, we haven't really gotten a lot of traction in terms of meaningful change. Instead, um the Industrial Relations Commission has gotten further involved, and we're currently in the process of a hearing with them, and we're yet to sort of await an outcome from that hearing in terms of some of the pay issues that New South Wales psychiatrists have been advocating for, but again, that doesn't solve the broader problem.
SPEAKER_05Yeah, no, that's really helpful grounding for what's going on.
SPEAKER_03Thank you for that, Pramudi. Thank you for sharing that as well. I suppose I'm also curious to understand on the impact of training, or at least the perspective from a trainee, or even from yourself, Catherine, as well. Can you tell us about what has been the impact, you know, with the pre-existing workforce challenges as well as now the psychiatrist resignation on training?
SPEAKER_04Yeah, to be honest, this whole journey has been a real upheaval in my way of thinking because I'm kind of finishing up training, and I think my whole journey of being a registrar, being a medical student, being a student before that has been if you're conscientious and you do your best, then you know that's how you achieve the best for patients, which I still believe on an individual level. But I think because of that I didn't have much of an insight into the systemic problems, and so I didn't quite realize I didn't notice or quite register there was a systemic problem when during my training there'd be a very vulnerable person. I'd try to get a community team linked in for and there wasn't one available, or when there was a patient in the emergency department who I think would have benefited from admission, but we had to make the difficult decision to make do with discharge because there wasn't a vet available. And so I think there were problems grumbling all along that I wasn't really cognizant of. And it was a real shock to me when a whole bunch of psychiatrists who I respected, many of whom supervise me along the way, resigned. It was just, what is this? What does this mean? And so that's when I started thinking, well, because I also felt, well, how can you leave this service behind? And then I thought, no, these are psychiatrists I've really respected, they're the ones who've taught me about. You invest in the whole person, you take the time to, you know, review people, you see each individual. And so I thought there must be some reason. And that's when I kind of realized and hearing more of the psychiatrists talk about a decline that's been happening over sort of 10 years or so. Really experienced psychiatrists saying that they've watched services and the availability and accessibility of services worsen over many years, that I realized, oh, there's a problem and it's it's getting worse. And I started talking to other trainees. I have been fairly fortunate in how I've been supervised. As an advanced trainee, I've had some protection in some regards, but I know that both pre and post-resignations, there's been a lot of uncertainty about supervision in certain terms. And I think also there's just this general sense, I've always wanted to be in public psychiatry, that's why I came into it. And now I think there's this whole sense of what is the future of public psychiatry in New South Wales? If this is the trajectory it's been on pre-resignations, and yet even with this action, things haven't changed. What is going to happen to public psychiatrists? And I wonder if I become a staff specialist in New South Wales, which is what I've always wanted to do, am I going to burn out if some of my most respected colleagues have burnt out? My most experienced college, how am I as a first-year consultant going to fare? So that's all been like quite worrying. And I think seeing a lot of the psychiatrists sort of stand up to the system and say, no, this isn't just on us, this is about being looked after, this is about us getting the help we receive. I think that sort of also inspired me, in a sense, as well, to think, well, I guess advocacy is part of the CAD meds or whatever where drilled in as trainees. Maybe that's kind of where I need to turn my head as well as a finishing trainee.
SPEAKER_00I was hoping to ask Catherine about something that Pramudi said, which was origin of these issues a couple of years ago, where it became really difficult to hire. And wondering if you had any comments and what might have led registrars looking at joining the system, start to think, no, we don't want to be involved in this system. And that's essentially about recruitment and retention.
SPEAKER_01Yeah, thank you. I think that you know, this is in essence a an issue of recruitment and retention. I've worked as a clinical director for uh many years now, and throughout that time, one of the main things, you know, my role has been has been about developing a workforce, um, about getting the psychiatrists in, because that's the way that we can provide good service, good care to people who have mental illnesses and need treatment. And it's been a theme right throughout that. We've invested in training registrars, we want to train our registrars. It's sort of part of the life of a psychiatrist is being involved in that experience. And when people get to the end, I'd have many conversations with trainees as they finish. And the conversation is almost always really pretty much what Nicole's saying. I'd really quite like to do it. I've always imagined that I'd do public psychiatry, but I look at the system and I'm worried about the on-call. I look at the system and I'm worried about being blamed for for things that are going wrong. And also I'm 40. The average age of people attain fellowship is 40. I've got my children, I want to buy a house, I'm living in Sydney, and I need to go out and actually be able to do that. And so that the remuneration really matters and the decisions that people make.
SPEAKER_00What are the features of a system that really make someone want to join that service?
SPEAKER_01I think that's a a really great question. And I it and I think part of the frustration here is that we've I feel like we've really had difficulty engaging the government and the Ministry of Health in that conversation. I think that one of the most probably the most important thing that would make a difference in my mind to who wants to join a service is knowing that the service is providing good care, knowing that they're going to make a difference to the lives of people that they want to treat. And if we're not doing that, then people say, look, I'm I can do a better job if I'm on my own, if I'm sitting in an office and I can control those things. So you need to have a functional system that has sufficient investment, that has sufficient resources, but also that is listening to two psychiatrists directing the care. So an over-bureaucratized or an over-managed system that isn't engaged with the clinical expertise of psychiatrists is really also sort of a very unattractive place to work.
SPEAKER_00Look, I was a director of training for a number of years in a regional part of Queensland. The dream of being a psychiatrist, I think, is the autonomy to do good for your patients. And when I reflect on what has been said by all three of our guests today, it seems that the government and the systems in which people work are now an impediment and a barrier to providing good care. So you're being told you can't have the resources to adequately deal with patients, but we also demand that you treat every person that comes through the door. So my feeling is that pay is a part of the issue here, but probably work conditions and the ability to actually provide ethical care in a competent system is probably even more important.
SPEAKER_01I think that in a sense they're they're related. I think that part of the signal of what remuneration is is a sort of the value and the importance of the work that we're doing. So I think they are related things.
SPEAKER_00So yeah, it's difficult to recruit people if you treat them poorly and you don't pay them what their services are worth.
SPEAKER_02I guess just to add that investment and resourcing are just so crucial. And we sort of have ended up in a system, and not just in New South Wales, but everywhere where we're continually asked to do more with less. Like in New South Wales, over the last 10 years, there's been a doubling in mental health presentations to emergency departments, but we've seen a shrinking of our mental health workforce. And yeah, I often compare mental health resourcing with cancer resourcing. Um, so in mental health, we have 15% of the disease burden, um, second only to cancer, which is 17%, but with a 2% difference in disease burden, there is a 100% difference in terms of resourcing because cancer care gets double the health budget that mental health care does. And as a group, we keep doing more and more and trying to bend and make it work, which I think is really noble in some ways, but maybe we're not doing the best for our patients and for the services that we work in if we continue to bend. I had, you know, a really interesting conversation this Congress actually with some of the um Victorian psychiatrists that were involved with the Royal Commission. Um, and what they were saying was that because they continued to bend and bend and try and, you know, the role of a psychiatrist shrinked to being just about enacting the Mental Health Act and providing medications. When it came to the Royal Commission, they were kind of seen as colluding with the system. That's what psychiatrists thought was good and wanted to do, when actually internally they'd been advocating to provide better care, but they just weren't able to get that traction. And so then that was the story in Victoria where psychiatrists were seen as being part of the problem. Whereas I'm hoping that what we're doing is changing that narrative and saying that actually psychiatrists are also saying this is not good enough, rather than us continuing to collude with a system that's depleting resources.
SPEAKER_03Thank you for sharing that as well. Suppose as a trainee myself, I'm kind of curious to know, you know, with regarding training requirements, what has been the impact of with the pre-existing workforce deficits as well as the current situation now in terms of meeting those training demands or training requirements?
SPEAKER_04So I think it's very variable, different services. Some services are just so much more stretched, and I think have been much more impacted by inability to recruit. And it's hard for me to speak directly about that because as I said, I've been in more protected services over the past couple of years. The other thing is that I think sometimes it is very hard to measure the struggle of trainees with supervision. And I know that the college has tried to emphasize when there's an issue with supervision, that's something we want to address. Please let us know. But I think there is an unspoken and sometimes spoken culture of, well, if I can just get through this term, it's better to lay low and not cause trouble by mentioning issues with my term. And especially I can imagine being a junior trainee and being quite scared of rocking the boat, or say a stage two trainee who's desperate to get this term counted because otherwise their training will be delayed because it's a mandatory term. So I think there are people who've struggled at these junctures where it's they're in a bind as to whether they want to speak up or not.
SPEAKER_03There are a lot of challenges, you know, for everyone involved in this very complex situation. I want to understand has it been supports available or avenues to seek support? If you had any concerns about training or workload or supervision?
SPEAKER_04I can't speak for other districts, but I think there are trainee reps who, at least some of the ones I've known, have been really open to try and collect feedback and present it and communicate it upwards. Also, certain people, directors of training, people who have some influence, have been very helpful. It's just very hard when the conflict is between you and a management that is conflicted between your needs and what the the government is saying. And so I think that's why a lot of the frustration is directed at the government.
SPEAKER_00Can I ask about that? Well, I was a director of training, as I said, and one of the things I told my registrars is there's always an assumption that the doctors can act as the shock absorbers for the system. Whenever there's an extra task, you go to often the most junior part of the team because they don't know how to say no. You develop that capacity as you become more senior, you get more confidence in what you're doing. A really good example of this happened in Queensland where there was just a culture of never giving people overtime. They would work the overtime and they would not be paid the overtime. And it really plays on the image of the doctor of themselves as a professional who wants to do good things for their patients. And you're describing this feeling of the pressure from above, which I think really reflects this. Do you feel that you have the ability or you're being taught the ability to say no to unreasonable demands, or do you feel that this sort of pressure forces you to go along with the crowd, if you like?
SPEAKER_04That's a really interesting question. I think that in a way going into psychiatry has taught me a lot about that. Because these things that we talk to patients about, about boundaries and self-respect and things like that, it's kind of in the past year and a half seeing that play out between the whole profession and its employers and the forces above, that's made me think, oh, actually that applies in our workplace as well. And I think that's something that maybe I've I'm learning and still struggle to learn very late in the game, in a way, because definitely my whole life in medical training has been your identity as in serving. And it's funny looking now at I have many friends and relatives who are in medicine, and the amount of stuff that they will just cop but will take on the chin because that's what doctors do. And I think it's even a kind of badge of honor to be I am a selfless doctor. I always felt that was a good thing. I thought that was just how we function, and it's only now that I'm realizing, oh, that causes problems. That causes problems because you can become complicit in a system that then says, Well, these are our needs. If you're not going to care about your needs, then we'll just do what we need to do or what we think is best and ignore you guys. And I think it's especially important because I've realized that in psychiatry, we're not just representing ourselves and our own self-care, we're representing very vulnerable people and their needs. Um, like patients deserve a better resource system and staff who aren't burnt out and feel that they can't speak up. And so I think that's where the culture does need to change. I think maybe it's changing slowly as we're seeing the strikes in New South Wales as well. That would have been unheard of previously. But seeing a lot of my colleagues say, no, this is actually affecting patient care.
SPEAKER_05There's that concept of the clinical marshmallow that came up from that unfortunate incident as well. So I think that's probably a bit of what you're speaking to there as well.
SPEAKER_04Yeah, I think the clinical marshmallow has been really wonderful because it's just so stupid and it's just such a silly thing, but people have really embraced it. Well, marshmallows, you know, they they're soft and they're bouncy, they can like bounce back from stress. So I think it's been a fun kind of way for doctors to bond as well.
SPEAKER_01I was wondering if I could just add something about the training from from my perspective. Um, make a comment about what happens when you provide training in a permanently uh resource-constrained environment. It would be my view, um, having watched the delivery of training in New South Wales for a long time, that it kind of has become a very reduced process where it becomes literally one person comes in and the aim becomes we need to get them out the other end and do whatever it takes to get to get that person out the other end, as opposed to we're providing a great training experience and where oh, we need to make move things around. Because you just don't have the choices available to you. So if this person is going into a position that is not very well resourced, we know that the supervisor isn't there at the moment in the whole process and that and that's become a permanent state in New South Wales without any capacity for us to be looking at any point, what are we doing to make this better? What are we doing to ensure that people are actually growing? We're really just wanting to make sure that they survive. And it's it's very sad to me that that is the experience that our trainees would be having.
SPEAKER_02I guess the other thing that I'd add to that is that things have been so bad for so long that there's probably a generation of people that actually don't know what good training or what good services look like. And so their expectations are also, you know, in order to be able to escalate or complain, that depends on what your expectations are. But if all you've seen is that actually, you know, we have to make these tough choices, and that's the nature of the work that we do, then again the bar for what warrants a complaint or an escalation changes as well. And I think we're seeing that kind of race to the bottom in New South Wales because things continue to get worse and worse.
SPEAKER_04I think that's absolutely true as a trainee. I think even for me, it was just normalized that this is how an after-hour shift operates. Even the language, you know, if we need to get them at the door, I would congratulate myself because I got these many people at the door, and it's only with the larger perspective that I think you only get with time. You see, that's actually not necessarily good practice. And I think when I started talking to some of my advanced trainee colleagues in other states as part of our education program, it really struck me that they don't do that there, or oh, they have a much less restrictive mental health act there, or they actually have assertive outreach teams that can see patients, and that's much more common than here. But when you're a trainee, especially when you're a first year trainee and you're told this is what you do, that's what you think good psychiatry is.
SPEAKER_05Thank you all for sharing. Some of the really significant challenges being faced in New South Wales at the moment. I wonder if we can perhaps shift to the future and maybe sort of take a bit of a sort of more hopeful perspective about what might be able to be done or what should be done to perhaps change this course and try and achieve a better outcome for the trainees, psychiatrists, and patients as well.
SPEAKER_02I guess for me, one of the sort of silver linings with all of this is that there's been so much public attention on what's going on. And I have to say, I was really bracing myself for a lot of commentary about greedy doctors and, you know, a lot of stigmatized conversation about psychiatrists, but we didn't actually see a lot of that. Like, you know, when we were doing our reviews of the sort of media that was coming out, it's probably 80-90% positive media around this. And I think that really reflects society that now values mental health, understands the challenges of mental illness, believes that there needs to be more investment and resourcing of mental health care. And so hopefully we're in a different space now where, with that changed community sentiment, we can actually influence decision makers and governments to take mental health care seriously. And so if that's something you know that we've been able to achieve through this movement, then that's something that I think we can be proud of. And hopefully it sets the groundwork not just in New South Wales but across the country. I think there are issues in mental health care. Um and if we can get more attention on those issues, that would be amazing.
SPEAKER_00You you mentioned the union, but you didn't give us the name. Could you tell us the name of the union?
SPEAKER_02Yeah, sure. So it's Asmoff, it's the Australian Salaried Medical Officers Federation, or they call themselves a doctors' union.
SPEAKER_00And well, without getting into the complexities of it, the uh psychiatrists were the first in New South Wales were the first movers in this space before the rest of the doctors joined the movement, which has complicated the uh the campaign. Do you do you think that there will be a resolution across all of medicine, or do you think there are specific solutions needed for psychiatry?
SPEAKER_02I think there are specific solutions needed for psychiatry, at least initially, because the types of workforce gaps that we have are not seen anywhere else. It's one of the things that I find really interesting is that, you know, over 10 years ago, ED physicians had a 15% workforce shortage, um, and they were and the government came in and stepped in with a wage solution to try and keep ED doctors in the system. We have a 30% vacancy rate, double that of ED physicians, and there hasn't been interest from the government to try and bring psychiatrists back into the sector. So I think, you know, we really need to advocate for the importance of psychiatrists in the sector, and there are definitely specific challenges in mental health and in the psychiatry workforce that aren't there in the broader doctors. I think they absolutely need changes in the broader system too, but there are some challenges in psychiatry that are different.
SPEAKER_00My understanding is that Asimov does understand that as well and do support psychiatry in that.
SPEAKER_02Oh, absolutely. So I think you know there's there's a parallel process happening here.
SPEAKER_01I just wanted to just t tie back the the theme that we went to before, which was about the relationship between the industrial issues and the and the care that is being provided to people. I couldn't guarantee this, but I'm pretty sure that if you surveyed most doctors about the health care they provide, most doctors would think that they were giving good health care if they were in oncology, if they were in renal medicine, if they were orthopedic surgeons. They would probably be quite proud of the care that they give. And I'm not sure that in public mental health that most of us could actually be saying that. I mean, you might think that you you individually did a good job, but not that the services are great care.
SPEAKER_00And I think that that really does separate out psychiatrists from the behavioural reinforcement of a system that rewards the wrong behaviours is so much more important for psychiatry. I mean, if you don't get a service in something like surgery and it happens three months later, that doesn't have the same impact of what might be called learned helplessness in a group of patients who essentially learn they're never going to get the service that they need. Or if they get it, it's going to be a degraded service. So I absolutely agree with what you're saying. Look, what one of the things I'm really interested in in is talking to politicians because they clearly have a very different view of what's going on. Even when you talk to them and it appears that they do understand the issue, they may not be able to act or they may not want to act because they perceive either it's against their interests or that they're balancing some other interest against what the doctors' union is saying. And I was wondering particularly from Moody if you have a perception of why the New South Wales government is acting the way it is.
SPEAKER_02I think there are a number of challenges. So one I think is the misunderstanding about what a psychiatrist does. So I think, firstly, you know, things like broken bones, heart attacks, cancer, everyone knows what they are. But I think, you know, part of the government's plan around how to deal with this workforce crisis has been role substitution. So I think there's a misunderstanding fundamentally from politicians as to what psychiatrists actually do and the sort of really high-risk, complex decision-making medical work as doctors that we do. So that's probably one part of it. The other part of it, I think, is that this has been a really challenging time in an industrial sense in New South Wales because there's been nurses striking, train drivers striking, fieries. Before that, there were paramedics and police officers. And so, from an industrial point of view, I think there are lots of challenges with the government giving, you know, what the public may perceive as being highly paid doctors a wage solution. But I also wonder if, because of this context, maybe that's why the government just sort of really like funneled us into this industrial situation because that's what they were thinking about. So they couldn't really broaden the horizon to see that actually what we were coming to them wasn't with, you know, doctors or psychiatrists need a 25% wage increase. We actually came to them with a workforce crisis and we were looking for a solution for our workforce crisis, and that could have included and should have included broader investment in mental health care. But I think they were so blinked that they couldn't shift from this either. And so, you know, this wasn't like some planned campaign. And I think, you know, in hindsight, there are things that we should have done, I think, as well to try and broaden it and help them see it as a broader issue. But that's just not the way it played out.
SPEAKER_00I guess mental health education is also for politicians and the general public. So, but if we're thinking about the point we want to get to, it would be that there are mental health services across New South Wales that provide good level of service where the doctors are not unduly stressed, that they're paid adequately for the work that they do, and that therefore they're that we're competitive with uh other states, and that there's not a poaching. Um, and I guess in the broader term that we would hope that that would apply all the way across Australia and New Zealand, so that we're not continually competing with each other to uh poach our um our best workers.
SPEAKER_05Alright, well I think that's all the time we have today, so we'll need to bring this discussion to a close. I'd like to say a huge thank you to Pramuthi, Catherine, and Nicole for coming on the podcast today to help us understand the challenges being faced in New South Wales. This is such an important issue, and your candidness and strong advocacy is much appreciated. I'd like to also thank Andrew and Yoon for joining me as hosts today.
SPEAKER_00Thanks, Michael.
SPEAKER_05Thanks, Michael. We'd also like to acknowledge David Beale and Nishda Kuma from the College who give us so much support in producing and editing the show. We are also thankful to Australasian Psychiatry for the opportunity to make these podcasts, as well as Sidoni Prentice for our artwork and Shady Day for our music. We encourage our listeners to rate the podcast on whichever app you have accessed it, as well as promoting it to other registrars or supervisors. We always love getting feedback or suggestions for further episodes, including volunteers interested in being a guest. Please get in touch by email at thethoughtbroadcast.podcast at ranzcp.org. That's all for now. My name is Michael Waitman. Thanks for listening. We'll catch you next time.