The federal government has held a Rural Health Stakeholder Roundtable in Canberra yesterday, with ways to boost GPs in the Hunter and regional Australia high on the priority list.
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| Lyne MP, David Gillespie |
The government has begun steps to introduce a National Rural Generalist Pathway, which will help improve access to training for doctors in the regions.
It comes after new figures were released, showing Australia will have a surplus of 7-thousand doctors by 2030.
Assistant Rural Health minister David Gillespie says doctors need access to frontline training because they never stop learning.
“You spend more time doing that training after you graduate than you do at university,” he says.
“At the moment, the preponderance of that happens in metropolitan centres and we [the Turnbull Government] want that post-graduate training to be expanded and rolled out in more rural and regional centres.”
Dr Gillespie says the Pathway will help keep doctors in the regions when they finish their study, rather than seeing them flock to the capitals.
The roundtable also looked at establishing a National Rural Health Commissioner to work with frontline GPs and all levels of government to get the best outcome for regional Australia.
David Gillespie says they’ll have a lot on their plate.
“He or she will liaise with universities, with local health districts, with regional training organisations to make sure we get a certain slice of the medical workforce directed, as much as we can, towards rural and regional Australia,” he says.
The roundtable walked away with a need to decentralise the medical workforce in Australia
and get it out into the regions.
“We need to keep working on medical workforce distribution across the country because we have plenty of medical professionals coming through university,” Dr Gillespie says.
“We want to put policies of action in place to make sure rural and regional Australia – and remote Australia – get more [of the] medical workforce.
“Mental health, dental workforce, Indigenous workforce, pharmacy workforce. We’re not just focusing on getting doctors distributed everywhere; we want the whole suite.”
