Kelvin Thomson (Wills, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

Yesterday, I had the pleasure of meeting one of my constituents, Laura Raiti, who is a fourth-year Doctor of Medicine student at the University of Melbourne. Laura and the Australian Medical Students' Association tell me that Australia is currently experiencing a crisis, with a finite number of clinical rotations for the increased number of medical students coming through. The prospect of new medical schools threatens to dilute educational resources and further add stress to Australia's current medical training crisis. They say new medical schools should not be supported until the provision of sufficient high-quality internships and subsequent postgraduate training positions can be guaranteed.

In the last 10 years, the number of medical graduates in Australia has almost doubled. Medical student numbers are at an all-time high. This has serious implications for the quality of medical student training and for the government's ability to guarantee internships for domestic students. While there has been an increase in medical student numbers, what seems to have been overlooked is the need to match this increase in numbers with a sufficient number of internships and prevocational training places.

Despite warnings, a lack of workforce planning and commitment to a sustainable supply of trained doctors has meant that the issue of unemployed medical graduates is now a reality. Graduates who fail to secure internships will be forced either to continue their training overseas, lost to the Australian healthcare system, or to work in industries outside of medicine. Further down the training pipeline, registered medical officers are being left unemployed, and, in 2013, there were 2,000 applicants for specialist training, including generalist training, in Western Australia for only 700 positions available. Increasing student numbers and opening new medical schools is not the answer to a current severe training bottleneck that is preventing junior doctors from progressing to become useful independent practitioners. This training bottleneck is a result of a failure of nationally coordinated workforce planning between universities and federal and state governments. The bottleneck will worsen in future years as graduate numbers continue to climb and pressure rises on the availability of specialty training places.

The solution the students recommend is to redirect funding into providing more prevocational training places and a commitment from the federal government to fund a sufficient number of quality internship places for graduating medical students. Interest in the Commonwealth Medical Internships initiative, which carries a return-of-service obligation in a rural and remote area, demonstrates that the graduates being forced overseas are willing to work in rural Australia if given the opportunity.

The number of internship positions should align with Australia's healthcare needs. I ask the federal government to consider a nationally coordinated approach to regulating medical student numbers such that they reflect national workforce needs and the feasibility of a nationally coordinated process for internship applications.