Patrice Albert-Thenet is an ANU medical student doing a 12-month placement in the country town of Young NSW and he’s shared his thoughts on rural doctor shortages:
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It is no secret that it can be difficult to access doctors in rural areas with waiting times of months often experienced to see local or visiting doctors.
LaTrobe University and Charles Sturt University are looking to address this by creating a new rural-placed medical school, the Murray Darling Medical School (MDMS). The proposed sites listed for the MDMS include campuses in Orange, Wagga and Bendigo.
At face value, this seems like a good idea with the intention of having them practice there in the future.
The Australian Medical Students Association (AMSA) is opposed to the creation of a new medical school for a number of reasons. The proposed sites already have medical students from Monash, University of NSW and University of Sydney studying there on rural placements.
Current medical schools placing students in rural areas to study have yet to fix shortages in the doctor workforce experienced by rural areas.
In the past 10 years, the number of medical graduates in Australia has more than doubled from 1503 to 3700. There is already a bottle neck effect experienced by junior doctors with simply not enough jobs to go around.
In 2015, there were 323 more medical graduates than there were internship positions available and, in the same year, close to 800 GP training applications were rejected. Increasing the number of medical graduates, as MDMS intends to do, will not solve this issue.
AMSA believes that the approximate cost of the proposed MDMS ($48 million) would be better spent by establishing dozens of specialty training positions in rural areas.
Instead of waiting many years for the construction of the MDMS and its first graduating class, this proposal will use already available resources. If more training positions and specialist jobs were made available in rural areas, long term procurement of specialist doctors would be a distinct possibility.
The MDMS will not fix rural doctor shortages. It would place more medical students in rural areas, but the unfortunate reality is that the jobs and training positions remain in metropolitan areas.
