Australian Medical Students' Association Urges Governments To Commit To Medical Student Training

Main Category: Medical Students / Training
Article Date: 27 Feb 2008 - 1:00 PDT

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The Australian Medical Students' Association (AMSA) urged Australian Health Ministers, meeting at the Conference of State and Federal health Ministers in Sydney on Friday, to address long-term sustainability in health care by enshrining education and training benchmarks into the new Australian Health Care Agreements (AHCAs).

AMSA President Michael Bonning said the new AHCAs were an ideal setting to address the lack of available clinical training places for medical students, interns, and prevocational and vocational trainees.

"The government has taken steps to address the workforce crisis by increasing the number of medical students in Australia.

"However, the challenge for medical schools now is to adequately train students in the face of a lack of training capacity within hospitals", Mr Bonning said.

"To ensure sufficient quality clinical placements for medical trainees, we require specifically allocated funding, and benchmarks for the use of that funding, to appropriately support increased student numbers through infrastructure development and staffing support.

"This may include clinical teachers, IT, infrastructure and support staff, and the expansion of traditional means of clinical training, as well as exploring prospects for training in novel settings like private hospitals", he said.

As medical students move through the medical training continuum, pressure will be placed on intern, prevocational and vocational training programs.

"We urge states in this time of reform to make a firm commitment to confirm intern places for all graduating medical students.

"Furthermore, steps need to be taken to ensure that vocational training colleges are adequately funded so we do not move the bottleneck further along the continuum", Mr Bonning said.

"These clinical benchmarks are essential if we are to have a medical workforce that can cope with the demands of delivering quality health care to Australians", he said.

Australian Medical Students' Association

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