How do you solve shortage in Australia’s rural areas?

The senior members of the medical community in Australia are calling for the Federal Government to stop granting overseas-trained doctors visas.

These medical community members believe that while the shortage of skills in the remote and regional parts of the country are still going on, the migration program which is aimed to address it, has ultimately failed.

Dr Ewen McPhee is a General Practitioner in the central town of Emerald located in Queensland. He is the president of the Rural Doctors Association of Australia (RDAA).

”Is there a skills shortage and have we fixed it? Well, the answer is yes, there is a shortage, but no, we have not fixed it,” said Dr McPhee. ”The problem is that the workforce solutions we have in place now simply are not working.”

According to a report released by The Australian, the same concerns are being shared by the Department of Health, and has even made a formal submission so that the country’s immigration rules can be changed.

It is also stated in the report that the said documents which were released under Freedom of Information showed that the Department of Health is agreeing to doing drastic changes so that overseas-trained doctors can be stopped getting visas.

In the formal submission, all occupations in the medical field were asked to be removed from what is more widely known as the Skilled Occupation List.

The Skilled Occupation List, or SOL, identifies occupations which are deemed by the government that would benefit greatly from overseas workers.

Dr McPhee however, does not think that the health system in Australia is one of those occupations which could benefit from the program, and believes that it should be removed.

”You need to be really training doctors explicitly to give them the skills to live and work in the bush and we are simply not doing that for international medical graduates,” Dr McPhee stated. ”The issue is that often,” he added, ”International medical graduates are, I could probably almost use the word ‘forced’ to go out into rural and remote areas where they may not be culturally prepared to work, they certainly are not supported to work.”

”They are not given the mentorship and often the skills, training that they need to survive and thrive in those country areas,” he further went on to say. ”And often they are given the task of having to pass a very expensive exam, and as soon as they pass that exam they leave and move to areas where they feel much more secure and supported.”

”As the number of Australian-trained doctors have increased substantially over the past decade,” said a spokeswoman from the Department of Health on an interview with AB. ”It is timely to consider whether existing immigration markers are still appropriate for our health workforce needs.”

The spokeswoman also mentioned that the submission on the skills list also agrees with that position.

The ‘Ethical Dilemma’ of bringing doctors from overseas

The medical centres which were responsible for bringing in doctors from overseas into Australia are also being blamed by Dr McPhee, saying that these centres are doing it not to help solve the shortage in skills, but to simply raise their profit margins.

“It is not fair to rural communities which see a constant revolving door of doctors moving in and out,” stated the doctor.

Dr Michael Gannon, the president of the Australian Medical Association (AMA), also shares the same views as Dr McPhee that there is something wrong with the system.

”Often what we are doing is filling up corporate clinics in the middle of our cities, now that is not the intention of these regulations,” said Dr Gannon.

Dr Gannon said that the process of bringing in overseas doctors, especially from developing countries, do raise a heavy question from an ethical point of view.

”If an Australian town of people takes a doctor from South Africa, they were looking after 14,000 people, who then take a doctor from Uganda who might look after 24,000 people,” Dr Gannon said as an example.

Rural Students are being ‘targeted’ by Universities

In order to make sure that the remote and rural areas in Australia do have the doctors that it needed, Dr McPhee said that the government needed to give the matter a dedicated rethink, as it kept on favouring capital cities when it comes to major training hospitals.

”While we have our major training tertiary hospitals as the only centres of excellence in major city centres, we can hardly expect the confidence of clinicians to train in rural and regional provincial centres to exist,” said Dr McPhee.

Dr McPhee suggested that universities could be doing a much better job by taking in students who are more inclined to settle in these regions.

He feels that the whole matter is very exasperating, and that it’s a truly big challenge for the government as well as the whole health system.

”Certainly where universities do interviews,” Dr McPhee explained, ”They very much weigh them towards rural intent and rural background.

”That certainly has demonstrated that if you do that you can improve the retention and resilience of people shifting back into rural communities.”

Source: ABC.net.au