To improve the quality and effectiveness of medical specialty training, most stakeholders reported that - for the ten specialties included in this analysis - it is important for a proportion of training to be undertaken in settings other than public teaching hospitals.
When costing the expansion of training into a diverse range of settings, the public hospital workforce was maintained. This means that more specialist trainees will be needed in the training system to implement training in other settings.
These results align with other workforce research that supports an increase of specialist trainees and specialists for most specialties. Increasing the supply of the medical workforce is a long process that begins with university-based medical schools. Greater recognition of workforce shortages has led to recent announcements of increases to medical school intakes which should alleviate shortages in the future.
It is anticipated that the resultant growth in medical school graduates will increase the demand for training positions in the public hospitals. An expansion of training settings for educational purposes will partially mitigate this pressure on public hospital training position numbers at only a small incremental cost.