Emergency rooms at Bulli and Shellharbour hospitals were closed - because of a shortage of doctors. A Wollongong GP practice shut the doors when a replacement doctor could not be found. Some country towns have been without a resident doctor for years. Why is this so ?
We are obviously not training enough new doctors !
It is not as if being a doctor is a shunned profession ! Doctors are amongst the highest earners in the land. We have no lack of people leaving high school with the educational standards to study medicine - but only the top elite can gain entrance to medical school.
At the same time, our medical schools have a high proportion of overseas students. This is because we have a duty to help third world countries improve their health regimes - but because of our high rates of pay and doctor shortages here - many such students stay and apply for citizenship once they qualify.
We rob those emerging economies to bolster our own health system.
This doctor scarcity is actually an artificially contrived situation - controlled by that very same medical profession.
Specialist doctors dictate just how many new members they will train and accept each year into their medical discipline - and those numbers are deliberately kept small to safeguard specialist incomes.
Unfortunately, these specialist also control the numbers of GP's who can flow through the system. GP training requires a basic knowledge of each specialist discipline - hence the low numbers of such specialists dictates how many student GP's they are prepared to train.
We will not rid ourselves of the doctor shortage until we increase the number of doctors in training at our medical schools - and remove the stranglehold that specialists have on regulating those numbers.
The present situation is simply a cartel acting in it's own interests !
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