It seems to be an inescapable fact of life. The more wealthy and socially advanced a city suburb, the more general practitioners and medical specialists can be found there - caring for the health of the residents. At the other end of the health spectrum, there are literally hundreds of small Australian country towns lacking even a single local doctor.
The University of Melbourne recently conducted an interesting survey. They asked four thousand general practitioners in city practices what it would take to convince them to move to a country town of less than 5,000 citizens ? The answer was an overwhelming " No " ! It seems that no amount of incentive will coax doctors away from a city way of life and pleasant workload.
That does not surprise many local mayors who have become desperate to attract a doctor to their district. In some cases both a free home and modern consulting rooms have been part of the inducement, but even this has produced no result. In some cases a few city doctors have had a speculative look at the situation, but been put off by the poor social interaction offered by the district, coupled with a workload far greater than experienced in a city position.
It all comes back to the first rule of commerce - supply and demand ! When the supply is far less than what demand needs, the lesser end of the spectrum misses out. Put simply, we are not training enough new doctors to reverse that situation. If we had a glut of doctors, those country positions would be quickly filled by young medical people trying to get established in their own practices.
It seems to be a conspiracy between the medical profession and the government. The medical profession has sufficient clout with the political establishment to ensure that university places in medicine do not produce a doctor excess, and the various medical specialities carefully control the annual number of new trainees to their discipline that they enrol. In this way, doctor numbers are controlled and as a consequence, most new doctors settle into a comfortable city practice.
University medical studies also contain a quota of doctors in training from third world emerging countries, and many of these remain in Australia when they become qualified. Once again, this " lifestyle " choice robs their home countries of the medical people they so desperately need because they choose a higher income balanced against a lower workload by meeting our contrived doctor shortage.
Its time medicine lost the status of a " protected profession " and faced the realities of competition, just as engineers, architects and a whole host of other professions are facing today. All it takes is an expansion of medical training numbers and we will be churning out the people who will not only service this entire country, but also look for jobs overseas when they exceed demand here.
This is a contrived doctor shortage. There is no shortage of eligible entrants - if the course numbers were not artificially restricted !
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