Medical Internship Crisis

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!