Your diagnosis is correct. But what is your cure? How will you ensure the cure is not worse then the disease?
How many years do you think it would take to devise a new curriculum? How many more years for the new curriculum to be bedded down? What do you think is the essential knowledge base for a doctor practising in the year 2020 say?

Undergraduate-entry program typically last 5-6 years, you end up with something like a Bachelor of Medicine (BMed).

Then a one year internship in a public hospital. Upon successful conclusion of the intern year, doctors qualify for a full registration in the Medical Board of their State or Territory, and are licensed to engage in independent medical practice.

SO in theory a "Doctor", note the bachelor's degree, can practise medicine after 6-7 years of study.

Of course he then has to be accepted into a "College", you know the Doctor unions, designed to keep numbers small so as to increase wages and conditions for its members. (A nice "closed shop").

Maybe it is time to stop calling them doctors until they have a Phd, which usually requires a bachelors degree with first class honours, then a further 3-4 years study resulting in a thesis.

Becoming a REAL Doctor usually takes 8-9 years.

Steve,

PhDs know a lot about very little. GPs, (the ones who used to be able to set up and practise independently after completing their intern year) are expected to know quite a lot about a great many things. These days doctors who work in general practice but don't have vocational registration (i.e., Other Medical Practitioners) can expect to go broke unless they have extremely loyal patients who don't mind having much larger out of pocket expenses than do people who consult vocationally registered GPs. The Medicare rebate for OMP consultations has risen hardly at all in the last 20-30 odd years.

So in the real world where most people live a qualified GP will have done either an undergraduate degree taking 5 years or a graduate entry degree taking about 7 years (assuming a 3 year undergraduate qualification). Then there's 1 intern year and 3 - 4 GP training years. That adds up to either 9-10 years or 11-12 years; a little more time than it takes to train a REAL doctor - such as yourself, perhaps?

jrm

the 3-4 years you talk about are when "Doctors" work as RMOs then they have to be accepted by a "College" to either work as a GP or as a specialist.

While working as an RMO there is a 38 hr working week, with overtime and working RDOs able to be "banked". (This applies in Qld)

My GP has closed his books taking no new patients, it takes at least a week to get to see him.

No Doctors are not cheap labour, they should realise how good they have things. A closed shop with a well funded and media savvy "union".

Why ,if they are legally allowed to practice after the 12 month internship, does it take another 3-4 years before they can?

I have watched as bureaucrats have taken over wards and over nurse and trainee doctor accommodations and turned them into offices. They've supplied themselves with the latest in computerised systems to check on bed-day-occupation-rates and whatever else it is they check on but they have yet to wake up completely to the fact that computerisation has something to offer in relation to the actual practice of medicine.

Just in the last twelve months or so I saw a newspaper report concerning complaints about doctors' handwriting and the deciphering of prescriptions for patients in a hospital. Good grief! Why, after all this time, are there any hospital doctors at all who are still having to write prescriptions by their own hand rather than by selecting the appropriate item(s) on a computer screen?

Tanveer Ahmed thinks the problem is with the "grey, old men sitting in the colleges". It's not, or it's not entirely. It's also with the bureaucrats who know nothing about the practice of medicine, little about the uses of information technology and, because of both the former and the latter, little about how to use information technology to speed up the training of doctors. Therefore they haven't understood that bigshot medical/surgical specialists might benefit (and benefit us all) from being provided with training on the uses of info tech. (Ah, but they're already so well off - why should we give them anything more without requiring them to pay through the nose for it?)

And then there are the lawyers. It's because of the lawyers that diagnostic decision support systems have languished. Considering that one of the key reasons doctor training take so long is that the medical bigwigs want their trainees to have lots of experience, and considering that the reason they want trainees to have lots of experience is so that they can recognise the strangely abnormal from the normally abnormal, the value of well constructed decision support systems should become clear to any bureaucrat with half a brain. But I'm not betting on any whole-brained bureaucrat achieving a position of influence in the near future.

I started Medicine in 1990 and did not achieve my 'independent' right to practice - an FRACGP until 2005. That's 15 years for my PhD friends. I did not fail any of my degree, but I did go out of my way to try and be the best I could, develop well rounded skills and then to offer what I have for the benefit of my patients. If money was the standard to be measured, then cheap labour is right on the money! I'm a GP, I don't close my books, I make sure one third of my appointments are available at the start of each day, and I often work 12- 14 hour days - in the city! Not because I want the money, but you tell me how you decline to see a sick child at the reception desk, or refuse a home visit on an elderly patient of the practice. Yes, administrators have worked our system such that we are old and jaded before we start, the exuberance of youth a distant feeling. I'd like to go back to the hospital system to gain more skills in palliative care or obstetrics, but I could not afford to drop my pay to one third, as I have long standing debts to clear and new open mouths to feed. Who suffers? Every patient of every doctor.