AMA Victoria

Ridiculous experience – Got my contract breached by the employer. Reported to AMA and stated that it was my faults the contract was breached. So disappointed it's said advocating for doctors. But their advocating for cases to be resolved quickly by being the docs.

Expensive with poor service and re-traumatising the traumatised – Super disappointing experience. Slow and late on responding to matters, as I discovered when I had a question about my contract, a couple years ago, I didn’t hear back from the lawyer until after I had to make a decision on the contract. Eventually help drops off and communication stops, without any kind of closure phone calls or discussions. They prefer emails to phone calls; messages don’t get returned via phone calls and emails don’t get read. Immense amounts of patience for gaps in service delivery needed. Instead of being rewarded for your patience, you are criticised for contacting them asking for updates, or ignored

They suggest avenues & give you hope - those avenues end up being dead ends and then they are exasperated at you feeding back to them about the dead end that they suggested. After making a suggestion to you that they will get someone to help you, or they will help you, if that fails, you get a cold or officious tone along the lines of “well that’s that, then”.

Staff sickness or busyness is the excuse for repeated months of non-contact and eventually a formal email saying “can’t seem to get hospital interested, sorry” without phone call follow-ups. You get call-block at reception with repeated promises to pass on messages but no one calls you back. Emailing different people in the organisation to try to get onto someone, anyone, fails to yield any results.

You finally give up and cancel your membership and try to contact them to tell them why - and now the constant reference to the fact that you’re not paying them anything anymore so why should we speak to you? The lack of service when I was a paid up member is somehow missed as an accountability point.

Eventually, I was offered to speak to the most senior people. Middle management came back to me to make a time to chat to them, from the department that didn’t function in the first place. I emailed, sticking to the offer to speak to someone in senior management, and that email is ignored, as are many follow-up emails. If you don’t like my counter suggestion, just tell me why and reply. But there’s this culture of silent stonewalling at the AMA.

Eventually, it was let slip to me that there was an internal investigation of the handling of my case and an admission that case should’ve been reassigned and the communication was completely subpar. However, no one rang up and admitted any of this to me or offered any resolution.

Trying to get the help from the AMA is retraumatising you from the the actual events, even if they themselves put a call out to have you approach them about a hospital. If you actually break down and cry & have a rant at the repeated complete silence and disinterest and dismissiveness and dead ends where they give you hope but let down again - you are called manipulative. No acknowledgement of how manipulative it is to be constantly led up and down and up and down various false hopes.

Instead of taking responsibility, they simply tell you - you need mental health help. Because that’ll fix systemic and structural entrenched issues with the system and the organisations that are supposed to support you.

No one told me anything about my co membership with ASMOF or getting help from them.

I am 100% sure I will be name called manipulative etc for this review. But I think people need to be warned. The purpose of Google reviews is for honest and real experiences that people have had. Before they spend their hard earn money and end up retraumatised by the so-called body that is supposed to help you