I mentioned this briefly when I shared the excellent news that Jeremy got an intern job in Adelaide, but I think it's time to discuss it more thoroughly. First of all, we feel very lucky and relieved that Jeremy is not one of the graduating medical students who currently is without an internship position. At the same time, I am still outraged at the unfairness of the whole situation. Here is what's going on, in a nutshell:
(EDIT: I did not write the following points. They are taken from the AMSA website!)
The situation: there is currently a shortfall of 182
internship places for Australian-trained medical graduates. Governments
must act immediately to increase the number of internships, such that
Australian-trained medical graduates can continue their training and
serve Australia’s health needs.
So why should Governments resolve the current political stalemate and fund additional internships?
1. Doctors, patients and Governments know that many of Australia’s regional and rural communities are crying out for doctors.
Recent workforce modelling
indicates that in order to sustainably meet our future health needs,
our health systems must retain as many Australian-trained doctors as we
can. It’s telling that a doctor shortfall of approximately 3000 is
predicted even based on Australia’s current trajectory of medical
workforce development, which relies on the importation of thousands of
overseas-trained doctors each year. In this context, it’s madness to
even contemplate shipping out Australian-trained doctors.
2. Tens of thousands of taxpayer dollars and health system resources
go into training each and every medical student. Aside from the personal
time and financial costs of medical training, to deny a medical
graduate an internship is a huge waste of these resources.
3. At this stage, the students affected by this crisis are
international students studying in Australian medical schools. Such
students make up approximately 15% of the medical school cohort and pay
tuition fees of up to $300,000 over four to six years. It’s widely
acknowledged that Universities are reliant on this revenue to subsidise
domestic students and remain sustainable into the future.
4. Higher education is Australia’s third biggest export industry (after coal and iron ore) and was
worth $16.3b in 2010-11.
State economies (particularly NSW and Victoria) are heavily reliant on
international student revenues and are sensitive to issues affecting
those students. The majority of the Australian-trained students without
internships are international students in New South Wales, Queensland
and Victoria. Not providing internships for international students may
severely and irreparably damage Australia’s international reputation for
medical education. Many other countries actively compete for this
lucrative market and if international students are aware that their
degrees may be worthless, many will study elsewhere.
A 2010 paper
models the economic impact of declining international student
enrolments. Funding for sufficient internships for all
Australian-trained medical graduates (now and in the future) is clearly
an excellent return on investment.
5. We know that as a group, international medical students are happy
to take up internships in regional and rural areas, meeting our
communities’ health care needs. These graduates have much to offer
Australia, have been trained in our health system and are ready to work
if given the opportunity. Students who do not gain internships will be
forced either to continue their training overseas, lost to the
Australian health care system, or work in industries outside of
medicine. Some will choose to reapply in future years.
6. This is not a difficult problem to fix, provided that the
political will to do so can be found. AMSA understands there to be
sufficient identified capacity in public and private health systems to
accommodate the additional interns and the solutions are affordable,
both in terms of the size of health budgets and future return on
investment. The issue essentially comes down to money, as Governments
blame each other over the appropriate balance of funding between Federal
and State, private and public.
This issue is only set to worsen in future years, as graduate numbers
continue to climb and pressure rises on the availability of specialty
training places.
AMSA calls for all Governments to put aside political blame games and
realise the importance of maintaining a sustainable medical training
system that provides internships for Australian-trained medical
graduates.
A lot of reading - did anyone get through all that? Hahaha.
If Jeremy was one of the students who was still waiting to hear about a position, we would both be insanely stressed out, trying to be calm, bitter at the Australian system, and I know he would be having a very difficult time studying right now! This website (http://interncrisis.org/stories/ourstories/2012/) is a place where students can share their stories. We know both of the people currently on there from Queensland, Alexandre David and Eleasa Sieh. We could just as easily be in the same situation. I am keeping updated on the current situation and will do anything I can to help/advocate for these students.
On a side note, today was insanely productive. I completed the following:
- had a base day, wrote FIVE reports (was totally on a roll)
- filled out my exit interview for EQ form
- mailed some forms/documents
- 5k run at the gym (5k is amazing for me, I HAAAAAAAAAATE RUNNING!!!!)
- filled out selection criteria questions for a job in Adelaide and sent my answers to a couple of people for editing/suggestions
YAY ME!
