Email: dame.liaison@casa.gov.au
Season’s greetings to all! Thank you for all your hard work and support this year, and also for your patience as we’ve rolled out MRS. Improvements will continue to be made to MRS based on your valuable feedback. The next changes to the system will be made this month. This newsletter contains more information on the upgrade and what it means for you.
Some new clinical practice guidelines have been published on the Av Med website including information on medical treatments, procedures and investigations that may impact on a pilot’s ability to fly safely. You can now easily direct pilots and air traffic controllers to general information about grounding and medications in aviation. These pages can now be accessed from the Av Med website’s ‘Pilot/ATC’ homepage under Aeromedical Guidance.
CASA will be closed for business between 24 December 2016 and 2 January 2017 inclusive, so please submit any expiring medicals as soon as possible. If there are any urgent or problematic cases in need of our attention, please call us on 02 6217 1173 or email dame.liaison@casa.gov.au .
Have a safe holiday and I look forward to working with you all in the New Year. The next edition of the DAME Newsletter will be available in February 2017.
Michael
A number of improvements will be made to MRS in December. You will notice the following changes:
We are continuing to work on improvements and further changes will be made to MRS in the first half of 2017.
An applicant can ask for a reconsideration if they disagree with CASA’s decision on their medical certificate application. DAMEs can carry out reconsiderations on behalf of CASA. A reconsideration should be completed within 10-12 weeks and a written report must be submitted to CASA. Payment is at a rate of $250 per hour capped at $1000. As there is only a small number of requests for reconsiderations, DAMEs may only be sent one or two reconsiderations a year. If you are interested in undertaking this work for CASA, please let us know by emailing clinical.governance@casa.gov.au to find out more about the process and requirements.
We have received a number of medicals where the certificate revalidation has not been completed, or is only revalidated for one month. Unless there is a good reason to not revalidate or to shorten the revalidation of a certificate (please put a comment in the medical explaining why), we would appreciate it if you could give certificate holders the maximum revalidation period they are entitled to (up to two months).
From 5 December 2016, you won’t be able to use communal stamps that are generically assigned to a health centre (e.g. Defence and RFDS clinics). If you are having problems using MRS, or have not set up your own login, please email dame.liaison@casa.gov.au.
94 per cent of medical certificates are now being issued within Av Med’s service delivery target of 20 days with the average being six days. We thank you for your help in achieving this great result.
Most outstanding medicals require more information from the applicants before they can be processed by Av Med. As of midnight Tuesday 29 November 2016, Av Med had 1,337 open medicals. 1,116 of these medicals required more information from the applicants.
The average time for the issue of a certificate was seven days in October 2016, down from 39 days in April 2016. This timeframe is from the date of the applicant’s medical examination and excludes time where Av Med is waiting for more information from them. The average time for the issue of a certificate increased slightly to 10 days in November 2016. This was largely due to receiving extra information requested from applicants, allowing staff to complete the assessment of older applications.
Previous editions of the DAME Newsletter contain plenty of helpful pointers for using MRS, as well as other important information relevant to your role. You can read every newsletter issued during the past three years on our website.