Dear Diver Dan,

I have read all of your comments and you are categorically wrong in absolutely everything that you say.

Probably time to go back to watching children's television programs, they might be a little easier to understand.

nodiverdan/northstar:

..."The uncomfortable truth": Come to grips with it!

Northstar, it’s time to listen to the facts rather than the AMA’s mistruths.

(1) There is a rural doctor shortage, but it is NOT a shortage of interns or RMO's. It's a shortage of GP's, emergency specialists, obstetricians etc. Sending junior doctors to rural locations and expecting them to perform procedures such as lumbar punctures, ascitic taps etc will be detrimental for patient's health. That is why experienced and highly trained international doctors have to be imported.

The shortage developed because in the past because not enough medical students were being trained. This has been rectified with large numbers of positions being opened in 2005-09. As these students graduate and become fully qualified as doctors (ie become GPs or specialists) over the next decade then the shortage will disappear. But that takes time, and is wrong to allow interns/RMOs to practice unsupervised in complex environments.

(2) You're confusing a university degree with a job. Sure the government allowed an increase in the number of places, but at NO POINT did they guarantee that international medical students or domestic full fee paying students would have jobs. What has happened now is no different to what has happened to students who have degrees in commerce and law. An Australian medical degree is recognised worldwide, and there is no reason international students cannot practice in the other 192 countries serving the rest of the 99.68% of the world’s population in places which will have a genuine shortage in 10-20 years time.

(3) We have addressed the shortfall. The number of domestic students coming through the ranks of their universities will be sufficient to meet demand. As I said, it will take some time for them to become fully qualified, but we will not be having the same problems in a decade from now...

Unless we open up more intern spots for sympathetic reasons – creating an excess of substandard doctors...

If we are to train foreign Doctors in Australia, at considerable expense to the Foreign students, then surely the "product" we seem to be selling, ought to include obligatory intern-ship, without which, all of the previous training becomes worthless, and or, leaves some very highly trained people, with few other choices, than to pilot a taxi cab, in a crowded city.
There remains a huge unmet need in the bush for trained, or in training, and therefore supervised medicos!
Why, we even had a discussion not all that long ago, about approving Doctors' assistants?
Former and very highly trained and extremely competent army medics, who often have better trauma management skills than many doctors, on the basis of vastly superior practical experience?
For which, but particularly in medicine, there's simply no substitute!
I live in the bush and have been waiting over thirty years for elective surgery, to fix a hernia.
Supervised interns, could take on the simple stuff or open and shut surgery! [And the obvious pun was intended.]
If only politicians weren't always completely quarantined from the end point consequences, of their often obdurate obtuse decisions?
Then surely, we would have adequate, "coal face", staffing levels, in our public hospitals!
Rail lines would be properly maintained and trains would now be very fast and run on time.
Decentralisation would have occurred many years ago, and there would not now be gridlocked cities, with infrastructure no longer able to keep up with ever escalating demand.
I mean, as an example, infrastructure that's simply deferred to meet politically motivated budget demands, costs AT LEAST DOUBLE, just a single decade later!
And properly planned rapid rail roll-outs, would quite literally pay for themselves, if only govts retained critical resumed rezoned land, which as later residential land sales, would refund in full, all the requisite outlays!
Similarly, Interns, training as specialist rural GP's, would allow more people to consider returning to the bush, relieving some of the crush in crowded, overpopulated, overpriced, gridlocked cites.
Common sense is arguably the rarest of all commodities, but particularly, it seems, in politics?
Rhrosty.

Rhrosty,
You have written that without an internship a medical degree is useless. This is completely false. The medical degree makes someone a doctor. For Australian students the law means it is then necessary to do a one year internship to demonstrate they are safe to practice medicine And also to act as cheap labour for the public hospital system.
I went to medical school with many international medical graduates who then directly after completing their degrees returned home to work.
We have sold these students a well respected medical degree at an internationally competitive price. The internship is nothing to do with them, that is strictly for Australian students.
Of course I also went to medical school with many other international students from developing countries who's medical degrees were paid for by ordinary Australian taxpayers for the purpose of helping these countries. Most of these students completed their degrees then suddenly decided they did not want to go home and stayed here, without ever paying back their the AUSTRALIAN TAXPAYERS.

This whole situation is just about foreign people trying to take advantage of Australia. We should be educating Australians as doctors, end of story.

There have been recent allegations that hospitals reserve available internships for foreign students to shore up the number of fee paying students for universities they are associated with. If so, such preference discriminates against Australian medical students.