6. Workforce and Training
Governments have expanded medical school places dramatically. Medical training does not stop when young doctors graduate from medical school.
To capitalise on this investment, we need to ensure that junior doctors who have finished medical school can then access high-quality training positions and go on to graduate as fully-trained specialists in general practice and other areas of medical specialty.
In the past few years, the Federal Government has increased training places in general practice and other community settings.
However, most medical training is carried out in public hospitals and, in this regard, the States and Territories are lagging in their efforts to provide enough training places in public hospitals to match the output from medical schools and satisfy future community needs.
Two bodies will play a key role in supporting the provision of medical training in coming years. The Medical Training Review Panel (MTRP) provides high-quality advice to the Government on medical training numbers, while Health Workforce Australia has been established and commissioned to undertake workforce planning and provide funding support for clinical training.
New classes of health professionals, such as physician assistants, are also being considered as part of strategies to address health workforce shortages. A number of pilot programs are currently underway to assess their impact.
Training programs for doctors, nurses, and other health professionals rely on providing them with a strong clinical experience, which is now under significant pressure due to policies put in place to increase the health workforce in Australia.
Australia has renowned standards of medical training, with doctors undertaking rigorous and comprehensive training programs.
We need to maintain these standards in order to ensure the high-quality patient care that the Australian community deserves.
Patients need to know that increases in medical student numbers will translate into more doctors on the ground with the right skills, and that access to care will be improved over time.
The next Government must ensure that the States and Territories follow through on their commitment to provide sufficient quality training places in public hospitals to meet future workforce requirements.
New funding arrangements for training are being introduced as part of the National Health and Hospitals Agreement. The next Government must use this opportunity to make the States and Territories accountable in this regard.
The next Government also needs to ensure that we do not put more pressure on the resources available for clinical training. Diluting the clinical experience available to doctors has the potential to undermine the quality of medical training. Australia must capitalise on the significant investment it has made in extra medical school places and not divert resources to establish new classes of health professionals that are unproven in the Australian context.
The next Government must:
- Agree to retain funding for, and implement, recently announced training places for pre- vocational and vocational medical education;
- Direct Health Workforce Australia to undertake rigorous workforce planning to help the States and Territories calculate the requirements for training places in individual medical specialty areas;
- Link all Federal Government funding for teaching and training to performance indicators that incorporate a concrete guarantee of training positions for all domestic medical school graduates;
- Establish a biennial review of clinical training places to be undertaken by the Medical Training Review Panel, utilising the support and resources of Health Workforce Australia, in order to ensure that shortfalls in the number of pre-vocational and vocational training places are quickly identified and addressed;
- Ensure that Health Workforce Australia supplements the effort of the States and Territories by funding specific programs that will boost training capacity and help maintain standards, including programs that fund protected teaching time, support for innovative training models, and professional support programs for junior doctors; and
- Implement a moratorium on Federal Government funding for undergraduate training places for new categories of health workers, such as physician assistants, pending robust modelling by Health Workforce Australia that demonstrates both the need for these training places and the capacity to provide adequate clinical experience without impacting on the training of other health professionals.
* For a full pdf version of the Key Health Issues for the 2010 Federal Election click here
Photo Gallery
Foreword – AMA President, Dr Andrew Pesce
User login
undergraduate and postgraduate training
1. It saddens me till no end to see medical schools sending medical students to private hospital for training due to lack of clinical teachers and the alleged lack of teaching capacities in the public sector.
It saddens me even more to hear interns are without jobs and training posts in a number of states despite the shortage of doctors in Australia.
These are despite the fact that there is 1.6 billion dollars on offer from health workforce Australia for initiative for setting up clinical training attachments in Australia (mind you the tendering process is only for 2 months).
2. Do you think medical training review panel can help? what about the AMC i.e. the professional government body responsible for medical training and why set up a new body to duplicate and compete with the AMC but not to look at why the AMC has not been able to perform in these area and looking at ways to help them to do so. ( for example, how the PMETB was formed and how it eventually become part of the GMC in the UK)
3. can someone please explain why the government in their public information domain stating that the professional medical colleges are responsible for training and clearly in quite a few of the college public information domain stating as well as in practice only responsible for the standard of training e.g. RACGP
Am I confused or is the government / folks running the 'show' disorientated?
Post new comment