Northern Territory surgeons to be trained locally under new agreement

Surgeons. They’re the people who help us in some of our greatest times of need and soon they’ll be trained in the Territory. See how the new rural-focused medical program will work.

A batch of locally-trained surgeons will start working in Territory hospitals in the coming years.

It will be the first time local students have been able to stay in the NT, with most having to relocate to Adelaide to complete their studies.

A Memorandum of Understanding was signed this week between the NT government and the Royal Australasian College of Surgery.

RACS Councillor Associate Professor Kerin Fielding, who is also the Rural Health Equity Strategy Steering Committee chair, said there were several parts of the plan already in motion.

“We’re looking at increasing the number of training positions up there so we can have people that are based there,” Dr Fielding said.

The Northern Territory will have a hub based in Darwin, with nodes in rural hospitals like Katherine and Alice Springs, and be able to do outreach to places like Gove.

Dr Fielding said the rural curriculum has already been developed, focusing on differences between services delivered in rural settings compared to urban centres.

“Rural surgery is quite different to urban surgery,” she said.

“There are nuances in rural hospitals that you need to know like the hospital’s capability, what other surgeons are available to help you, you need to know what the ICU can cope with, what the transport capabilities are.

“It’s really about the things that you need to run a service in a rural site that will be bespoke to those sites and knowing the context of where you’re working.”

Dr Fielding said RACS would be working with Charles Darwin University and Flinders University as part of the process.

Medical students will soon be able to stay in the Territory to study surgery.

“We need to encourage final year medical students to stay in the Territory and getting them keen and interested early is key,” she said.

Dr Fielding said research showed born and raised Territorians were the key to the medical professionals shortage issues, with a lot of current surgeons being international graduates.

“If they’re rural origin, from a rural school, they’re much more likely to stay in a rural site,” she said.

“The problem at the moment is they go to the city and meet a partner then don’t go back to the rural settings.

“It doesn’t solve the immediate crisis, we know that but we’ve done lots of things to try and improve the vision of rural surgery.”

Chief Minister Natasha Fyles said workforce retention would be the main aim of the program.

“Training surgeons in the Territory will mean we can retain our workforce and not lose our talent to eastern states,” she said.

A focus will also be on increasing the number of Indigenous trainees.

It is hoped that the first intake of surgeons will begin training in 2025.