Rural towns given the poorest performing doctors, Senate told
Rural towns are a dumping ground for underperforming doctors thanks to a perception that bush practice “is for losers”, a Senate inquiry has been told.
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The country’s worst performing doctors are being dumped in rural towns, cementing a perception that bush practice “is for losers”, it can be revealed.
Graduating medical students who fare poorest in written exams and interviews are often sent to the regions, a Senate inquiry has been told, on the belief they are not “good enough to get a guernsey in the city”.
The skewed logic has compounded an already-dire medical predicament for country locations, many of which cannot find doctors or have patients waiting months to see a GP.
Some clinics are turning away 200 patients a day.
“The rural pathway is a part of Australian general practice training that unfortunately has seen a selection process whereby doctors that performed poorly or least well in their selection process were streamlined through the RACGP into the rural pathway,” past president of the Rural Doctors Association of Australia (RACGP) Dr John Hall told the inquiry.
This year 1328 GP training places were allocated to the RACGP — 764 of those were in the city, while 617 were in regional areas, under a federal government dictate.
James Cook University in Queensland told the committee that rural training amounted to a “conscription” method.
It said lower ranking applicants were “generally allocated an unpopular and inflexible” rural pathway whereas higher-ranking applicants “win the choice pick” of the flexible general pathway.
The university said a perception had been created that “rural is for losers”.
Past President of the Australian College of Rural and Remote Medicine, Dr Ewen McPhee, also told the inquiry “if you got rural … you weren’t good enough to get a guernsey in the city”.
The claim was rejected as “rude” by the RACGP’s rural spokesman Dr Michael Clements.
“It’s a very unfair and sad comment, particularly if it’s supposedly coming from somebody who’s supposed to represent rural doctors. It was almost painting rural as a second choice, which is certainly not the case,” Dr Clements said.
He said the majority of GP trainees who choose bush training did so “because they want to go to rural and because they intend on training and staying there”.
“Our rural pathway isn’t full of people that are the second-best candidates by any means,” Dr Clements said.
However, he added, “it might be fair to say that people who tried out for the general pathway that didn’t get one of the positions took the rural pathway because it was an offer (of a medical training place)”.
The Senate committee report handed down this week found the shortage of doctors in the regions was severe.
It heard evidence that the number of trainee doctors opting to become GPs had plunged from 50 to 15 per cent of medical graduates.
To solve the problem the committee, among other things, has called on the government to increase the $39.10 Medicare rebate paid to GPs.
Currently trainee doctors face a $60,000 pay cut when they leave a hospital to work in a practice as a trainee GP.
“It used to be that a doctor who left hospital to start up training got a pay rise. Now they get a significant pay cut. And so that’s happened in the last 15 years,” Dr Clements said.
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Originally published as Rural towns given the poorest performing doctors, Senate told
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