There is growing concern in the community about the shortage of medical specialists. Additional medical school places have been created over the last few years to address this shortage, and this will further increase with the additional places announced for 2007.
If an expansion of settings does not occur, it is likely that some existing settings will over-reach their capacity to train. Expanding the range of available training settings will assist in accommodating these graduates as they complete pre-vocational training and start specialist training.
Opportunities for training in the private sector and community health care settings currently occur on an ad hoc and unstructured basis. There is a need to use opportunities in public settings (including regional, rural and ambulatory settings), the private sector (hospitals and practices), community settings and non-clinical environments (such as simulated learning centres) to provide more diverse and appropriate training.
In addition, the Australian Medical Workforce Advisory Committee publication The Public Hospital Medical Workforce in Australia (2004) reported that many newer specialist trainees and resident medical staff are less willing to work the long hours of their predecessors and to accept unpaid overtime. The ageing of the current specialist workforce means that they too are not keen to work the longer hours that they may have previously been willing to do.15
The ageing and participation rate of current specialists, coupled with the increased number of junior doctors expected to enter specialist training, will place considerable pressure on the capacity of existing supervisors. There is therefore a need to expand the pool of available specialists willing to supervise trainees - and there is a potential pool of new supervisors in the private sector.
15 Australian Medical Workforce Advisory Committee, The Public Hospital Medical Workforce in Australia (2004). Also see Australian Institute of Health and Welfare, Medical Labour Force Survey (2004).