AMA opposes Macquarie Uni full fee paying medical school places

The AMA continues to oppose Macquarie University's plan to establish a full fee paying medical school in 2018. The AMA wrote to the Assistant Minister for Rural Health in December last year to express its complete opposition to the proposal, saying that it would do little to help improve the distribution of the medical workforce and would add to the already widely acknowledged pressures on the medical training pipeline. The AMAs view is that the establishment of a medical school at Macquarie University will divert training resources away from where they are needed, and feed more graduates into a training pipeline that is already being overwhelmed by existing medical graduate numbers. One of the strengths of medical education in Australia is diversity in the selection of students, including those from lower socio-economic backgrounds. The AMA firmly believes that entry to medical school should be based on merit as opposed to financial capacity and, in this regard, there is good evidence that high fee levels and the prospect of significant debt deter people from lower socio-economic backgrounds from entering university.