Introduction by Croakey: In a world that is being rapidly transformed by geopolitical pressures, advances in technology, and increasing demands on services and systems, human considerations must remain at the heart of healthcare leadership.
This is the message from convenors of the annual conference of the Royal Australasian College of Medical Administrators, to be held in Naarm Melbourne from 10-13 October 2026.
In the post below, Marie McInerney previews some topics the conference will explore: a diverse lineup of speakers will present on leadership through and after adversity, responding to challenges, addressing racism, team building, changing healthcare culture, cultural safety, the need for courage, and more.
And a keynote from international AI and healthcare expert Tom Lawry will be well timed, as the Federal Government announces plans to build an Australian artificial intelligence framework.
The conference also follows a recent report from the Australian Alliance for Artificial Intelligence in Healthcare, which found the sector’s regulatory and governance systems are unprepared for the rapid uptake of AI that is occurring, and amid concerns about the lack of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander representation in the Federal Government’s approach.
Early bird registrations for #RACMA2026 are now open. You can view the full program here. This article is the first in a Croakey Conference News Service series from the event.
Marie McInerney writes:
Australia’s heath sector needs to be at the table in coming months as the Federal Government develops the details of its plans for regulation of artificial intelligence (AI), to make sure our leaders think beyond commercial and everyday imperatives, says US expert Tom Lawry.
Lawry was speaking to Croakey ahead of his visit to Australia for the annual conference of the Royal Australasian College of Medical Administrators (RACMA), where he will be a keynote speaker.
Earlier this month Prime Minister Anthony Albanese announced his ‘AI in Australia’s interests’ commitment to creating a national AI framework, which plans to create an Office for AI and regulations on the energy and water demands of data centres.
Health’s place in the AI revolution
A former Microsoft executive and author of the 2022 book Hacking Healthcare: How AI and the Intelligence Revolution Will Reboot an Ailing System, Lawry welcomed the Prime Minister’s recognition of the importance and potential of AI, as well as the opportunities for Australia to be a big player in the ‘AI space race’ that’s currently underway globally.
But he said it must ensure that the health sector is fully involved in the development of, and decision-making around, its strategy, saying that the stakes in AI’s application in healthcare go way beyond those of other fields, like consumer apps recommending the best restaurants.
“Healthcare has to be at the table,” he told Croakey.
As an author and consultant advising global organisations on AI strategy and deployments, whose roles at Microsoft over 16 years included being National Director for AI for Health and Life Sciences, Lawry is a full-throated advocate of the technology.
He likened the growing use of AI to parallel moments in history like the introduction of cars, reminding those who are squeamish or sceptical of the times in the past when other transformations in health, from hand hygiene to keyhole surgery, were also resisted.
However, with many Australian health leaders expressing concern about the massive implications for health and healthcare that AI poses, Lawry agreed there was an added responsibility for the balance of “gas and guardrails” — unfettered innovation versus cautious regulation — in healthcare.
He is urging:
- Equity: Ensuring AI does not widen disparities in access to healthcare.
- Transparency: Making clear when and how AI is involved in care decisions.
- Trust: Building confidence that AI recommendations are safe, fair, and evidence-based.
- Sustainability: Designing AI systems that reduce burden rather than create new ones.
Regulation and transformation
Lawry noted that Europe was building guardrails through the European Union Artificial Intelligence Act, to come into full effect by August 2027, while the United States is “still the Wild West” for AI.
The EU AI Act has been described by European health researchers as marking “a turning point in the regulatory oversight of AI systems in the EU”, and particularly significant for the healthcare sector, where the use of AI products for diagnosis, treatment, and patient care is rapidly increasing.
One article, published in Health Policy, says the Act introduces welcome quality and safety requirements for AI used in the healthcare sector, especially regarding data governance for AI medical devices. But it warns about “a lack of comprehensive oversight and accountability mechanisms for low-risk health-related AI systems that may result in the wide emergence of ineffective, unproven, and potentially harmful AI systems” and erode public trust.
Despite seeing the need for caution, Lawry is also concerned that the health sector might set its sights too low on the use of AI, saying medical and health leaders will miss the boat if they see AI only as an efficiency tool, or one they just flick to their technology teams.
“As a [health] leader, you don’t have to understand how AI works if you understand what it’s capable of and where it’s going,” Lawry said.
“The real transformation will come when we reimagine healthcare itself: not just digitising forms, but rethinking diagnosis, triage, patient engagement, and clinical decision-making from the ground up.”
“AI gives us the ability to be so much better at the things we care about,” he said. “It truly is a disruptive force – or is capable of being one – if people choose to harness its power.”
A conference with a difference
While AI is clearly one of the hottest topics in health at the moment, the #RACMA2026 program has a broad scope, including much that is out of the ordinary for a medical conference.
To be held in Naarm Melbourne from 10-13 October 2026, at the iconic Melbourne Cricket Ground (MCG), the conference is titled, Performance Health Leadership on the Global Stage: Human Judgement. System Performance. Safe and Sustainable Care.
It is billed as seeking to “reflect the evolving complexity of medical leadership in a world shaped by global pressures, technological advancement, and increasing demand for safe, high-performing health systems”.
Convenor, Dr Anand Ponniraivan, said the organisers’ aim has also been to put “very human” considerations, including vulnerability and courage, at the heart of the two-day program and its preceding workshops. This is reflected in the diversity of speakers and sessions on offer.
Keynote speakers include Karambir Singh Kang, the former general manager of the Taj Mahal Palace Hotel in Mumbai, who lost his wife and two young sons during a terrorist attack on the hotel in 2008.
Kang’s leadership saw hotel staff help save over 1,500 lives and resume operations in what has become a global case study in resilience, values-driven leadership and organisational culture.
Two high performance sporting stars will also speak at #RACMA2026.
Former Carlton football club captain Sam Docherty’s message – after 184 AFL games, three knee reconstructions and two cancer diagnoses – is that: “You don’t choose the challenge, you choose your response.”
And Darren Shand, the driving force for over two decades behind the culture and high-performance environment that shaped the New Zealand All Blacks, will present his focus on building the “team around the team”.
Ponniraivan, who is medical director at Monash Health in Melbourne, told Croakey the convenors hope the conference will be a provocation: to disrupt thinking, and to bare and explore the human side of leadership and healthcare, as well as the frameworks and strategies needed to build and maintain strong health systems
They want to “make the comfortable uncomfortable and the uncomfortable comfortable,” he said.
Focus on culture
Veteran Australian health leader, GP and rural generalist in emergency medicine, Dr Jillann Farmer, will have some uncomfortable messages at the conference for Ministers, governments, and health sector leaders on the need to act now on racism, sexism, bullying and harassment in Australian healthcare, as well as on wider issues of courageous decision making and “speaking truth to power”.
Farmer is a former Medical Director of the United Nations, a role in which she managed healthcare for 100,000 UN personnel and tackled global challenges like the Syrian chemical weapons crisis, the Ebola outbreak and the COVID-19 pandemic until returning to Australia in 2020.
She was chosen in 2023 to lead RACMA’s A Better Culture project, then known as the Culture of Medicine Project, commissioned by the Commonwealth Department of Health to find tangible ways to cultivate systematic and sustained behavioural change across the specialist medical sector.
It was launched after the 2022 Medical Training Survey, which showed more than one in three doctors in training had experienced or witnessed bullying, discrimination, harassment, or racism in the previous 12 months. This “inexcusable” number disproportionately included Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander doctors.
The Better Culture project last year produced two key reports.
The mainstream ‘Pathway to Better’ report issued 21 recommendations and called on employers, specialist colleges, and state and federal governments to take “deliberate, coordinated, accountable action” to ensure all healthcare professionals – not just doctors – do not work in environments “that are often quite unsafe”.
In it, Farmer writes that its authors “unapologetically disappoint those who thought that the result of this project would be a training course or a ‘how to fix the culture’ manual – because improving the culture of healthcare workplaces is going to be a complex, difficult, protracted effort”.
“It is going to require changes to things that some parts of the system desperately want to hold in stasis.”
The second report, ‘Cultural Safety: From Compliance to Commitment’, by Wiradjuri rural medical generalist and administrator Dr Sarah Jane Springe, responds to sustained evidence that Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander medical trainees experience and witness racism at more than double the rate of their colleagues.
But Farmer fears the reports, like so many before them, are now lying on a dusty shelf.
She hasn’t heard a word in response from Health Minister Mark Butler, nor most state and territory health ministers.
One area where Farmer says Butler could immediately assert federal authority would be to order collection and reporting on health workforce diversity data in Australia, to explore admissions and career paths for trainees from different cultural backgrounds.
“What is their background? What is their ethnicity? What’s the ratio of success for white Anglos versus migrants? That (documentation) happens in the UK. We have no visibility of that, not at all,” she said.
She highlighted the latest UK data, published this month in the British Medical Journal, showing that doctors from some cultural backgrounds are far less likely to be offered specialist training places in the UK than white candidates.
While the gap in offers experienced by black and Asian doctors in the UK varies hugely across different specialties, official data from NHS England (NHSE) shows that, across all specialties, black doctors are four times less likely to be offered a training place than white applicants.
The worst gap was in anaesthetics, where black applicants stood less than one in a 100 chance of being offered a place in 2024 and were 30 times less likely to be offered a place than white counterparts.
In general practice, all ethnicities stood a similar chance of being shortlisted, but black doctors were offered a place only 20 percent of the time and Asian doctors only 23 percent of the time, compared to 64 percent of white applicants.
The report is “damning”, Farmer said – but at least it exists.
“We can’t claim Australia is any better because we just don’t know,” she told Croakey.
Challenging the status quo
As well as seeking action from governments, Farmer told Croakey that she was calling for courage and a capacity to disrupt from those who lead health services, backed by her strong belief that “healthcare culture isn’t really accidental”.
“My big picture view of the moment is that change isn’t happening because the system is working for the people who hold power,” she said.
“The system at the moment keeps medical trainees just a little bit scared, just a little bit afraid, just a little bit uncertain of their future… That keeps them cowed and controllable, and that makes running a hospital or a healthcare system a lot easier.
“If you want different behaviours, you have to design different systems because systems give you the results they’re designed to give you.”
In urging scrutiny, she quotes the old legal principle, echoed in Game of Thrones, “work out who benefits [from the status quo]”, a message also often shared by Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander health leaders.
Farmer’s report acknowledges that real cultural change will require deep and wide collaboration: governments at all levels, policy makers, regulators, employers, all healthcare disciplines, health service unions, medical colleges, universities and other training providers.
But it highlights that there is “no clear leadership structure or accountability that makes such reform conceivable”. Federal-state relations, interprofessional rivalries, funding constraints, industrial tensions and political pressures all present barriers, the report said.
That’s why Farmer is particularly urging Minister Butler to step up, to at least “use his convening power” to bring key stakeholders to a summit to open discussions and require action.
It’s a lesson she learnt at the UN. “You may not have the power to do something, but the gravitas of your position allows you to bring people to the table and make them uncomfortable if they don’t move,” she said.
Exercise of courage
Like the conference convenors, Farmer also has a big focus on courage at the heart of healthcare leadership.
She talks about the growing attacks on health professionals and health facilities, including UN flagged vehicles and operations, in current and recent conflicts, saluting those colleagues who “continue to have the courage to operate in what is now clearly a situation where they are in peril”.
“It’s just open slaughter out there now,” she said, horrified at the impunity prevailing for those who have discarded long-held conventions to protect health professions and facilities in war.
“It’s just like any bad behaviour,” she said. “If you do it a little bit and nobody responds, you do it a little bit more until you discover that really nobody means it when they say this is off limits, and off you go. So until there are effective sanctions for breaches of those conventions, we can expect bad faith actors to continue to breach [protections for health workers and facilities]”.
Coming back to Australia from New York, she was also struck by how pervasive ‘kill clauses’ are now for public service executives – ‘immediate termination without cause’ – and the “dampening effect” that has on the frankness and freedom of their advice to government and politicians.
She recalls her very first medical administration role, decades ago, when the theme of her first meeting with her boss was about “surviving”.
“That broke my heart,” she said. “Yes, survival is important and, as someone who has crashed and burned, I understand that. But if your focus is on your own survival and your own viability, it really affects your risk appetite and your willingness to speak truth to power. And I mean to really speak uncomfortable truths to very powerful people who could kill your career. That is courage.
“Rural generalists talk about a thing called ‘clinical courage’, which is when it’s me and whatever skills I happen to have standing between the patient and death, and even if I’m not best doctor around, if I’m the only doctor around, then I just have to do it,” she said.
She’d like to see more explicit conversations in medical administration about “the exercise of courage and about speaking truth to power – even when your voice shakes”.
First Nations leadership
As part of the conference focus on First Nations issues, Melbourne emergency specialist Dr Glenn Harrison, a proud Wotjobaluk man, will address cultural safety as a core leadership responsibility.
Workshops in the lead-up to the conference include Aotearoa New Zealand presenters Dr Joshua Manukonga and Nadene Edmonds, RACMA’s Senior Advisor First Nations & Advocacy, on governing health systems after the “Doctrine of Discovery”.
As Croakey previously reported, Edmonds recently guided RACMA’s inaugural First Nations Leadership for Clinicians program, as part of the college’s commitment to foster and grow the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander medical leadership workforce, and to create pathways and support for First Nations medical leaders.
The conference will also feature the Langford Oration from Yorta Yorta and Wurundjeri woman Aunty Lois Peeler AM, the Margaret Tobin Challenge, the conference debate and a workshop program on 10–11 October, covering issues ranging from business cases and board reports to having hard conversations, and leading high-performance teams.
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