9 hours ago
Eligible medical school candidates turned away in their thousands each year
Medical education experts say the federal government needs to fund more medical school places for local students amid a dire shortage of GPs.
The federal Department of Health and Aged Care has forecast that Australia will need a further 8,600 GPs by 2048.
Monash University academic teams say that with more funding they could admit more eligible students to be trained in medicine.
"We turn away thousands and thousands and thousands of Aussies every year from medical school," Monash University professor and Medical Deans Australia and New Zealand president Michelle Leech said.
"They're all smart and they're all good people."
Professor Leech said at Monash University's medical school there were 12 to 15 eligible applicants for every single place.
In Australia, a student who achieves a 99-plus ATAR scores in the 95th percentile for the medical aptitude test.
A competitive percentile is above the 90th percentile.
Passing the multi-stage interview process may still not gain qualifications for medical school.
Pasindu Bandara is a University of Queensland medical student and founder of Strive Academics, a tutoring company that specialises in helping students get into medical school.
"We've seen a lot of students where we feel like they would make great doctors, and they would serve the community well, but one of the different obstacles stops them from doing so," Mr Bandara said.
"These are top students, they get the best scores in their schools, they're dux in their schools, they've got heaps of volunteering experience, they give back to their communities, but … on the interview day they don't perform well and they don't get through.
"In our last cohort, there was one student with a 99-plus ATAR and a 95th plus percentile score in the UCAT who ended up receiving multiple interview offers but didn't get through that interview stage.
"It's for a few different reasons — sometimes students get anxious and they're not ready for an interview-style [or] high stakes day because that's not something high school prepares you for."
Mr Bandara also said students who could not afford tutoring were at a disadvantage when it came to applying for medical schools.
"Students that can afford this tutoring essentially have one foot in the door in terms of getting a competitive score," he said.
The number of medical places for Australian students in universities is controlled by the Commonwealth.
But Professor Leech said that number had not grown in the past decade.
"The reason I think the Commonwealth has been cautious about expanding places is because over many years we have been getting our medical workforce from overseas," she said.
"But it's important to know that international students are funded separately and don't take spots from local students.
Royal Australian College of General Practitioners president Michael Wright agreed.
"For too long, we haven't trained enough GPs in Australia," Dr Wright said.
"We've been relying a lot on doctors who did their medical degrees overseas coming here and working, and they've been a great addition to our health system.
"But we need to pull our weight and make sure that we do train more GPs."
In its latest budget, the federal government announced that from 2026 100 new student positions will be shared between 22 medical schools Australia-wide, per year, increasing to 150 by 2028.
"More doctors have joined our healthcare system in the last two years, more than any time in the past decade," a federal government spokesperson said.
Experts agree the GP shortage is bad in the cities but was worse in the regions.
Aspiring medical students living in regional areas require a lower ATAR than their city peers to get into medicine at university.
However, Mr Bandara said the rural quotas for universities were a "broken system".
"For example at James Cook University, there's a big focus on rural health, but at the end of the day, a lot of those students preference [city hospitals] for their intern year, and they never end up actually servicing these rural areas."
Deakin University is one of only six universities Australia-wide that offer rural medical training end-to-end to encourage regional residents to stay locally.
It offers 30 rural training places at its Victorian regional campuses in Warrnambool and Ararat and says it fills those positions every year.
Rural Doctors Association of Victoria president Dr Louise Manning said having these "end-to-end" programs and "boosting positions in those programs would be much more likely to deliver some more for our workforce".
"Hopefully [they encourage] rural general practitioners rather than putting all these spots in the cities," she said.
Dr Manning said affordable and available accommodation for doctors, availability of childcare services, and support for partners of doctors were factors affecting regional recruitment.
Melbourne University declined to say how many students it turns away from medical school each year.
