Medicine graduates have nowhere to go
By Health reporter Tory Shepherd
Australia is heading for a medical crisis as doctors-to-be face an internship shortage.
The lack of training places for graduates will cause a bottleneck, leaving graduates out in the cold and prompting calls for a slowdown in the creation of university places.
International full-fee paying students are already failing to get an internship, and the Australian Medical Association says the problem will soon spread to domestic, fee-paying students.
The AMA will host a “medical intern crisis summit” in Canberra next week.
Ross Roberts-Thompson is the Australian Medical Students Association president and a final year student at the University of Adelaide.
He says having a medical degree but no internship is “effectively useless” because the only thing a degree qualifies you to become is an intern.
He said successive governments had failed to plan properly to address doctor workforce numbers, so a big increase in student intake several years ago, designed to ease the doctor shortage, would backfire.
“It’s a double-edged sword. We’ve got doctors who are under a heavy clinical workload already and don’t have enough time for teaching and supervision, and more and more students coming through,” he said.
“We’ve probably wasted a lot of taxpayers’ money and university resources and the students’ time.”
He said SA was in a relatively good position because there were no new medical schools to bolster the number of students, but that eventually the whole nation would be affected.
He is calling for proper data on workforce needs to be collected, but also for more of the medical community – including private hospitals and GPs – to be engaged in the process.
AMA state president Dr Andrew Lavender said in the future there could be 500 graduates without a training place.
He said much medical training was done “pro bono” by already overstretched doctors.
“What we’d like to see is actual funds towards earmarking time for clinicians to teach ,” he said.The Federal Government did not respond by deadline.
Article from The Advertiser, September 1, 2010.
