Government intervention in Medical Training

Medical training: first farce then tragedy is the title of a paper by Steven Shwartz, Vice Chancellor of Macquarie University.
Schwartz criticises the idea of central planning for the education of doctors. In the early 1990's the Government decreed that there were too many medical places in Australian universities, so they 'paid' the universities for less places. Five years later there was a chronic shortage of doctors and medical graduates were brought in from overseas. Today, medical undergraduates are concerned that there are too many doctors being trained again, and that there will not be enough postgraduate training places for them all. Schwartz prescribes a dose of market forces for Australia's medical workforce training, as opposed to the very inexact science of governments predicting future needs. He also suggests such ideas as universities and private hospitals being allowed to have a place in postgraduate specialist training.