Membership is key
Page turns over for new leadership
Dr Michael Page
AMA (WA) President
Our Association is important – to our profession, to patients, and to the wider community. We are the only organisation that upholds, protects and advances the interests of all doctors of Western Australia. Without a strong representative body, there can be no assumption that the rights and privileges that come with the responsibilities of being a medical practitioner would be respected by those who seek to exert power over us.
What gives us our strength? Our membership.
If I’ve learnt one thing through the thick and thin of the past two years of my Presidency, and many years of involvement in our Association before that, it’s that our membership is everything. You define who we are and what we do, and provide our reason for being.
“Our members define who we are and what we do, and provide our reason for being.
The AMA (WA) is a complex, multidimensional organisation, particularly so for its size. Our ownership and management of various commercial businesses and properties give us some resilience, albeit in very tough operating environments. But in the end, the strength of our membership is the key to long-term survival and success.
We are proud that in 2025 we continue to have the highest membership penetration of all AMAs across the country. But no State’s, nor the Federal AMA’s, membership has kept pace with the growth in the total number of doctors. This is true of many other membership organisations – participation is in historical decline. As a consequence, the pressures of inflation that affect the running of any membership organisation are beginning to bite.
The cost of living is a major, contemporary contributor to this challenge. Some non-members, including ex-members, of the AMA, are of the view that we will continue doing our advocacy work whether they are individually a member or not – so why bother paying?
The cognitive gap here is, of course, that we cannot keep doing what we are doing without revenue from member subscriptions. And unless we can reverse this attitude, there will come a tipping point beyond which non-participation will cripple our organisation – as we would not be able to pay our expert and dedicated management, media, industrial and other staff to carry out the functions required by our volunteer committees of members.
What would a world without the AMA (WA) look like? I picture a bleak, dim, post-apocalyptic landscape in which the sound of vultures picking over the carcasses of the dead is only occasionally interrupted by the maniacal laughter of a handful of survivors. More probably, it would be a world with no representative body to advocate for the pay and conditions for all public and many private hospital doctors.
We can be certain this would lead to a diminution in salary and conditions, and would see doctors become progressively subservient to administrators and bean-counters. Governments would have no opposition to cost-saving alternative models of care in the community; general practice would become a relic of the past.
“What would a world without the AMA (WA) look like? I picture a bleak, dim, post-apocalyptic landscape in which the sound of vultures picking over the carcasses of the dead is only occasionally interrupted by the maniacal laughter of a handful of survivors.
The authoritative, unified voice of doctors that educates and guides the public through so many matters of public health importance would fall silent, perhaps giving way for another health professional group to assume the mantle.
It’s not a world I wish to countenance. I understand some people may drop their AMA (WA) membership because they are disappointed with a particular outcome or policy position; others may drop out because they don’t feel they get enough out of it.
To the former group I would say: get involved. It’s your colleagues who are volunteering their time, day in, day out, to guide the organisation. If you have something to contribute, come and be a part of it, and make it better.
To the latter group: please remember the bigger picture. I guarantee you will notice the absence of your profession’s peak representative body more than you ever noticed what it has done for you since long before any of us were born.
Serving as President of the AMA (WA) has been an incredible privilege.
I wish to thank and pay respect to our Board Chair and Immediate Past President Dr Mark Duncan-Smith and our entire Board, Council and Committees; to our CEO Dr Bennie Ng and all of our wonderful and dedicated management team; and to my work colleagues at Clinipath Pathology and Sonic Healthcare, and earlier in my term Western Diagnostic Pathology and PathWest for their support; and most importantly to my wife Dr Sarah Page and our children, without whose support I could not have fulfilled my role.
I extend my congratulations and full support to Dr Kyle Hoath as he takes the baton.