The New South Wales Medical Students’ Council (NSWMSC) is calling for a legislated domestic-graduate prioritisation framework for entry to specialist training.
This is just one of its policy papers’ requests, released this month.
It also demands commensurate expansion of accredited training placements, at least 1150 per year, and for medical schools to press pause on creating more Commonwealth-supported medical places until downstream capacity reflects graduate supply.
The framework, as the NSWMSC wrote in its medical workforce campaign, would ideally model the fast-tracked United Kingdom’s Medical Training (Prioritisation) Act 2026.
The NSWMSC’s announcement follows the release of a Department of Health, Disability and Ageing report last month which predicted a shortage of over 12,800 GP and non-GP specialist positions by 2048, despite an oversupply of 11,000 prevocational doctors.
Vice chair of the NSWMSC and third-year University of Sydney medical student Josh Gaul told The Medical Republic the council was appalled by the oversupply of prevocational junior doctors despite the forecasted specialist shortfall.
Their policy, he said, aims to reduce wasted potential and the disservice to public investment in medical students’ education, including GPs, who may face unemployment later down the pipeline.
Under the framework, priority would be given to medical students who graduate from an Australian university.
Mr Gaul affirmed IMGs were essential and valued, and the proposed policy was in no way anti-IMG or xenophobic, but rather the implementation of a model “every comparable nation does”.
“Prioritisation does not reduce the role of IMGs in areas of genuine need; it redirects recruitment to these communities,” the NSWMSC’s campaign report read.
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Under the council’s proposed policy, IMGs currently practising in Australia would be grandfathered in as an initial priority group, while those arriving after the policy takes effect would need to wait a set period – five years, as proposed by the NSWMSC.
“If there is a shortfall and not every specialist training position is filled, then [IMGs] would be perfectly eligible to apply to enter training,” Mr Gaul said.
He also told TMR that Australia’s reliance on IMGs to fill specialist gaps posed a strategic risk.
“If you have a situation like covid or global instability, like war, we’re going to face a really acute shortage. A lot of IMGs [also] come from healthcare systems where they’re desperately needed in their own communities, [which] sits a bit uneasily with the WHO code of practice,” Mr Gaul said.
He told TMR the NSWMSC examined criticism of the UK’s legislation before drafting its own, which hadn’t specified how many years IMG students would have to wait before accessing training.
“We believe this [NSWMSC] policy will be synergistic with the government’s efforts to expand rural end-to-end training, like USYD’s Dubbo campus and Charles Sturt University’s Orange campus, which recruit students from regional backgrounds,” Mr Gaul said.
“By extending this priority scheme and policy that we’ve come up with, that will allow these rural graduates to get back to their communities faster, where they’re so desperately needed,” he said.
The policy was voted on by all the presidents of each main medical school society in NSW, and the campaign’s open letter has received just under 1000 signatures from medical students across NSW and the ACT, he said.
The campaign’s next steps, Mr Gaul said, are to seek meetings with every NSW state and federal member of parliament over the coming months and to publish a register of all parliamentary offices contacted and meetings held.
Thus far, 14 offices have been contacted, including AMA NSW, and three meetings have taken place.
In response to the campaign, AMA president Dr Danielle McMullen said specialty training colleges play an important role in delivering the medical workforce needed to maintain healthy communities.
“Colleges must look at their training program pipeline; the way they acknowledge prior learning and skills and the way they supervise training to come up with innovative ways to increase the training places they offer across the country,” the AMA president said.
“We know many hospital registrars not on training programs are delivering the exact same service as their accredited colleagues,” she said.
The post ‘Train us. We’re right here’: NSW medical students appeared first on Medical Republic.
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