Training of Medical Practitioners

The Australian Parliamentary Library has just released a briefing paper by Dr Rhonda Jolly entitled, Medical Practitioners : education and training in Australia. Various government policies since the early 1990's have been implemented as a reaction to perceived oversupplies and shortages of trained doctors, such as capping the number of university places, addressing rural shortfalls in doctors with overseas recruitments and a more recent policy of creating more medical training opportunities.

The number of Commonwealth supported commencing places in medical courses in universities across Australia rose from 1403 in 2003 to an estimated 2544 in 2008. Jolly says that this change in policy direction will take a number of years to address current shortages due to the complexities of medical training. Her aim in this paper is to explain these complexities and why previous policies have often had a negative outcome. "Understanding better how the transformation from student to ‘specialist’ medical practitioner works and the roles of those institutions which contribute to, and influence that transformation may help to lessen the possibility that these types of negative outcomes unnecessarily beleaguer the health system."