An Increase In Indigenous Medical Students Will Help Close The Gap, Australia

Main Category: Medical Students / Training
Article Date: 02 Jul 2009 - 6:00 PDT

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The Australian Medical Students' Association (AMSA) Global Health Conference continues today, with the focus turning towards our own backyard.

Medical Students will join leaders in Indigenous health to discuss and debate possible strategies to address the 17-year life expectancy gap between Indigenous and non-indigenous Australians.

This coincides with the Council of Australian Governments (COAG) meeting in Darwin today, which will focus on developing a national plan to achieve real health outcomes for indigenous people.

AMSA President Tiffany Fulde said, "the best way to improve the health status of Indigenous people is to empower them; this includes providing them with the ability to study university health degrees."

Improving workforce capacity by increasing Indigenous medical student numbers should be a priority for any plan devised to tackle this issue.

The state of Indigenous health, and the way in which this situation can best be addressed, will be discussed in greater detail tomorrow morning. This will include, a focus on increasing Indigenous medical student numbers, and the mentoring, recruitment and support programmes which will achieve this.

Tomorrow's session details:

University of Queensland
Raybould Lecture, Hawken Engineering Building

Friday July 3
9am Tania Major- Intervention For Health's Sake- Issues, Challenges and Ways Forward
10am OXFAM and AMSA- Close the Gap Presentation

For more information visit here.

Source
Australian Medical Association