Push to pull down Qld barriers as British docs want in

The Queensland Government is being urged to urgently streamline the process for qualified overseas doctors to work, as the state braces for an influx of British medics.

With a mass exodus of doctors from Britain to Australia looming, Queensland’s peak medical body urges the government to act on urgent streamlined recruitment and to make it less difficult for qualified medics to work in the state.

“If the overseas doctors are assessed as fully qualified and ready for shifts there should be no barriers as Queensland needs doctors immediately,” Australian Medical Association Queensland president Maria Boulton told The Courier-Mail.

“I believe the processes for international doctors is quite onerous. Of course, we must have the necessary assessment of their credentials and competency but if they want to make Australia home, let’s get them to work and impose no delays to their start date,” she said.

The British Medical Association has revealed that a survey of more than 4500 British junior doctors showed that a third are planning to leave the country in the next year to find work elsewhere, with many opting to move to Australia.

Four in ten junior doctors plan to leave the NHS as soon as they can find another job.

“It is estimated that there will be a shortage of hundreds of thousands of doctors across the world by 2032. We are already seeing the impact. But we can’t rely entirely on an overseas workforce - there needs to be a massive push to train up more doctors within the state,” Dr Boulton said.

The AMAQ chief said that doctors should also have a passport to work at any time in different states if that is what they want to do.

“There should be no blockages to doctors filling positions. One immediate solution would be to lift Queensland Health’s ban on its employees working as locums in other public hospitals on their days off,” she said.

The BMA said that junior doctors had faced some of the steepest cuts to their pay of any public sector worker over the last 15 years, with their pay falling by more than a quarter in real terms since 2008/09.

The BMA reports that junior doctors are cutting back on buying food and heating their homes to help make ends meet.

The BMA is calling for increases of 26 per cent and the union has said it is likely doctors will strike unless pay demands are met.

Originally published as Push to pull down Qld barriers as British docs want in