Rural

By Dr David RivettI was recently saddened to learn from an observant Canberra Times article that, while tens of millions have been forked out by taxpayers to ensure that medical schools boost their rural medical student intakes, only about half of them have been enrolling their quotas.

This lacklustre approach to the overwhelming doctor shortage in rural and regional Australia casts many of our Deans in a very poor light.  Worse still, it reveals that the very foundations of the Department of Health and Ageing’s program to address the ongoing workforce crisis are rotten and open to abuse.

Some universities are staggeringly flaunting the required 25 per cent minimal rural uptake.

Standouts for 2010 were the University of Queensland (7.5 per cent), University of Adelaide (9.7 per cent), and University of Sydney (13 per cent).

Professor John Dwyer responded to these revelations by calling for medical school places in Universities not meeting targets to be reallocated to those that did.  A similarly robust and firm approach is now required from the Department.

Not only must there be positive discrimination by medical schools, such measures should be extended to Medical Colleges.  Legislation should be enacted to enable them to positively discriminate in allocating training places to those genuinely committed to practice in rural and regional Australia. 

Currently, any such positive discrimination is open to legal challenge, and places any College doing so at risk of severe claims for damages from unsuccessful applicants, should they bias their selection criteria in the interests of meeting the workforce needs of non-urban Australia.

Such anti-discrimination waivers for the public good should also allow likely work output assessments to be used by Deans in selecting medical students.  Putting a 50-year-old student through medical school and then College training is not an efficient use of resources.  It may enshrine equal opportunity, but just as surely it embraces stupidity and neglects the public interest.

Similarly, if the statistics show one gender provides 20/30/40 per cent fewer hours in their working lives then their numbers trained should be boosted by the same per cent to achieve a stable work output in the years ahead.

Practical, evidence based, community focused decisions, made without fear of litigation, are needed from our Deans, not tokenism and flaunting of Government initiatives.