Use Health Fund To Build Medical Training, Australia

Main Category: Medical Students / Training
Article Date: 19 May 2008 - 3:00 PDT

email to a friend   printer friendly   view / write opinions   rate article

The Australian Medical Association called on the Rudd Government to allocate some of the investment returns from the $10b Health and Hospitals Fund announced in this week's Federal Budget to fund medical training places across the country.

The Fund is for capital investment and infrastructure; and the training of Australian doctors is an investment in human capital and infrastructure for health.

AMA President, Dr Rosanna Capolingua, said the Government is committed to excellence in education, and the Health and Hospitals Fund should also be used to invest in medical training.

"In health, human infrastructure is the foundation of good patient care. We need our highly-trained and skilled doctors working to provide service for patients, as well as buildings and equipment," she said.

To address doctor shortages, the Federal Government has embarked on the most significant expansion of medical school places in history. By 2012, the number of medical school graduates will be around 3,000 per annum. This compared with 1,586 last year.

"Australia welcomes the breaking of the doctor drought but we need to increase our capacity to train all these new doctors," Dr Capolingua said.

"We will need more training opportunities across the public and private sector and in General Practice, with more senior doctors supervising and teaching, more infrastructure and more facilities. We currently only have only 1,776 intern places across the country and we will struggle to find high-quality clinical placements in hospitals and General Practice for medical students from 2009 onwards.

"With the money now allocated in the Health and Hospitals Fund, governments should move with a sense of urgency to instigate the training places and fund the training capabilities of hospitals and General Practice to ensure Australians will receive the full benefit of the increased number of highly-trained doctors who will provide high-quality health services," she said.

To address the looming crisis, the AMA today called on the Government to ensure that the Health and Hospitals Fund can be used to invest more money into the delivery of the high standard of medical education and training.

The AMA believes this Budget should have been used to start building up the resources needed to train all of the medical students and graduates that will be entering the system in the coming years.

"It is the Government's responsibility to ensure that Australian medical graduates have an intern position when they emerge from Medical School. While these doctors are training, they are providing patient care and service to the community.

"We must not allow the high standards of training in Australia to drop, and we must be able to give our future doctors the medical education that they need to become the high-quality doctors that Australians expect," she said.

The AMA will be pursuing governments to accelerate the medical training agenda.

Australian Medical Association