Doctors In Training

By Dr Andrew Perry

The AMA Council of Doctors-in-Training (AMACDT) continued its relatively new but now firmly entrenched tradition of starting the year by convening the annual AMACDT Trainee Forum where trainee representatives from the specialist medical colleges come together with the AMACDT to share ideas and concerns and identify areas for action. The Forum has proven a huge success in the past, and 2010 was no exception. 

Trainee representatives from almost all specialties attended the Forum on 13 February 2010 in Melbourne, along with representation from the New Zealand Doctors-in-Training Committee and the Australian Medical Students Association. It was clear, listening to the voices around the table, that trainee representation in the specialist colleges has gone from strength to strength and that this is having a positive influence on medical training and the relationship between colleges and their trainees.

It is not surprising that medical training capacity continues to be the topic of greatest interest.

AMA president Dr Andrew Pesce and AMACDT Chair Dr Andrew Perry met Federal Health Minister Nicola Roxon in March.

Trainee Forum hard at work.

The discussion at the Trainee Forum was focussed on the AMA paper that proposes to use Health Workforce Australia (HWA) to fund projects that will boost training capacity across the medical training system, including pre-vocational and vocational training. This proposal includes funding for dedicated teaching and training time for senior clinicians, developing innovative training programs for interns and professional development programs to enhance the teaching capacity of junior doctors, and extra pre-vocational training positions in community settings. The Trainee Forum unanimously passed a resolution that called on the Federal Government to implement the proposals put forward in the AMA paper Supporting prevocational and vocational training through Health Workforce Australia.

With this additional support for the AMA paper under our belts, AMA President Andrew Pesce and I took the opportunity to talk about the proposals at our recent meeting with the Minister for Health and Ageing on 10 March 2010, reiterating the need to bolster funding and resources for clinical training across the spectrum of medical education. 

Soon after our meeting with the Minister, the Government announced that it would invest a total of $630 million to increase the numbers of training places, including increased pre-vocational general practice placements, GP vocational training places and specialist training places in private, community and rural settings. This is great news and goes some of the way to addressing the concerns aired around the table at the Trainee Forum. 

We now need the State and Territory governments to provide more training places in public hospitals so that all graduates can be provided with a training place for internship and beyond.