AMA VICDOC Spring 2023 - Magazine - Page 39
PROFESSOR
BRENDAN
MURPHY
AC
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THE STRATEGY IS AN ATTEMPT TO
COLLABORATIVELY IDENTIFY WHAT THE
PROBLEMS ARE IN THE MEDICAL WORKFORCE,
AND THEN MAP OUT A PLAN TO GET US TO
SELF-SUFFICIENCY.
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That means not raiding other countries’
medical workforces to achieve the right
numbers of doctors in the right specialties
and in the right geographic locations. I
think everybody agrees with the problems
we’ve identified in the Strategy – and the
approach and the priorities to fix it. The
challenge now is implementing it; we’ve got
to crack some of those hard nuts if we're
going to implement the Strategy properly.
WHEN IT COMES TO DOCTORS PER POPULATION,
WE’RE ABOUT IN THE MIDDLE OF THE OECD PACK.
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Looking at Australia as a whole, it looks
like we've got enough doctors to meet the
needs of our population. We're graduating
close to 4,000 doctors a year, which is far
more than the numbers that are leaving
the profession. In fact, we're growing our
medical workforce at a compound annual
growth rate of around 3.5%, although
our GP growth rate is, disappointingly,
only 2%. These figures are both higher
than the population’s compound annual
growth rate, which is around 1.5%. And yet
workforce shortages are quite significant
in various parts of the country. This tells
us that one of our main medical workforce
challenges isn’t supply, it’s distribution, both
geographically and between specialties.
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