Q&A with the AMA President The Australian Medical Association recently updated its Position Statement on the Health Care of Asylum Seekers and Refugees. The President of the AMA, Dr Steve Hambleton, spoke from Canberra with Andrew Lees, the Editor-in-Chief of Vector, on the direction of these amendments and the organisation’s thinking on refugee healthcare more generally. The issue of refugee and asylum seeker arrivals has been a political issue in Australia for many years. As future medical practitioners why should students care about this issue? It is a very important issue that we recognize already that students are very engaged with. We know that most of the people who are seeking asylum end up becoming Australian citizens, and we know the longer they stay in mandatory detention the worse their medical health gets, there is poor access to physical and mental health, and that impacts upon the Australian Health System ultimately. The Australian government has internal rules that target a maximum three month detention time, but we have got people who have been in there for over fifteen months, and we’ve got kids that were born in detention, we’ve got unaccompanied minors in detention, and as I say, a lot of these people end up being Australian citizens, and so those health impacts are really felt by everyone. You mentioned in your speech at the AMA Parliamentary Dinner in August 2011, which was about many things other than detention as well, but you also suggested that you considered mandatory detention to be “inherently harmful”, and that is the standard position of the AMA, and you have just mentioned some of the reasons why. What is it about mandatory detention that is inherently harmful, and what has the response been to those comments? The fact that people are already damaged, in terms of inherent harm, they’re already damaged. They have actually left their country of origin, they have actually struggled to get here, the thing about inherent harm are the uncertainties about what is going to happen to them, and the length of time people are there as part of that uncertainty, in that it seems to be forever. The other thing is that they’re exposed to other damaged individuals, you have got children exposed to that as well, you’ve got self-harm happening, you’ve got attempted suicide, a lot of stuff that we’re not hearing about that’s happening that we’re not getting access to.
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