President’s Word November / December 2016
November 10, 2016
DIT Diary: Baby Fever
November 10, 2016
FROM THE CEO
AMA (NSW) has embarked on a campaign of authenticity by photographing real doctors.
If you’ve ever had the pleasure of looking through a stock image library, you’ll know that a white coat and cheap stethoscope doesn’t make a model look like a doctor. Many of these photos look manufactured, and very few capture the diversity of healthcare professionals we have working in Australia.
Frankly, at AMA (NSW) we got sick of American stock libraries and pledged to rid our pages of inauthentic-looking photos of doctors. In a campaign that we’ve named ‘Real Doctors,’ we’ve gone out and photographed as many different medical professionals as we could convince to take part.
Like all good ideas, it came from the Internet. The recent ‘I Look Like A Surgeon’ campaign (#ILookLikeASurgeon), which originally kicked off in the US, sparked a powerful response worldwide, with women tweeting photos of themselves in a bid to break down professional stereotypes. Since the campaign started in August 2015, there have been more than 82,629 tweets with that hashtag and more than 308,677,079 impressions, which is the number of tweets by each participant multiplied by their number of followers.
The campaign is not only about challenging stereotypes (not all of which are gender-related), but about celebrating differences and achieving equality in the workplace.
AMA (NSW) wants to promote diversity in our profession and encourage medical students to pursue their goals in medicine by showing them what real doctors look like. For that reason, you’ll see a lot more faces you know in our pages and on our website, particularly women and doctors of different ethnicities.
AMA (NSW) is also working to improve diversity within its ranks. To achieve this ambition, we recently added five new Councillor positions. The quality of the candidates was extremely high and we feel incredibly fortunate to add such esteemed members of the profession to the AMA (NSW) Council. To read more about our new Councillors, please see page 16.
It’s been a tremendous year at AMA (NSW) and I’d like to take the opportunity to thank all of our members for your continued support. Happy holidays. dr.