Medical Trainee Forum
The AMA this week brought together trainee doctors from across Australia for a Forum on training pathways for the future, with a strong emphasis on improving access to a well-trained medical workforce for all Australians, no matter where they live.
Forum delegates represented major medical trainee organisations across most specialties including general practice, surgery, medicine, emergency medicine, psychiatry, pathology, radiology, and obstetrics.
The trainees discussed the growing pressures on the health system, including the need for more support and resources to ensure that the increasing number of medical graduates can access high quality training positions into the future.
Medical students numbers have more than doubled. By 2014, there will be more than 3700 students graduating from medical schools across the country.
These graduates still need to be able to progress through prevocational and specialist training, and this will require more training places in our public hospitals and other clinical settings than are currently available.
The Forum trainees unanimously agreed that there was an urgent need for the development of key performance indicators to measure the performance of the health system in supporting the delivery of high quality medical training. They are calling for the Medical Training Review Panel to prioritise this as a critical area of policy development.
The Forum also wants the Council of Australian Governments (COAG) to recognise the potential for access to medical care to be greatly improved as a result of the significant increase in the number of medical graduates since 2004. Trainees want COAG to take meaningful action to ensure that these graduates can access high quality prevocational and vocational training places, taking into account the analysis and findings of the soon to be released workforce planning undertaken by Health Workforce Australia.
Another Forum recommendation was for the promotion and support of clinical academia as a career pathway, recognising the crucial role of academic medical practitioners in training the next generation of doctors.
AMA President, Dr Steve Hambleton, welcomed the outcomes of the Forum, which represent a strong endorsement of the AMA’s policy on medical training, and congratulated the trainees on the quality of their deliberations.
Dr Hambleton said that the feedback from the medical trainees on the ground confirms that governments have a lot more work to do provide access to prevocational and vocational training positions and deliver on their commitment to improve access to medical care.
9 March 2012
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