cnbas LMG! A1
Thanks a lot Mana, A1 and D99 for your time and analysis that forecasted the future trend for UK trained doctors to get accredited positions in Australia. If there is no avenue in Australia to study medicine, I will end up taking that option and shape up things as the situation warrants. A senior of my brother from Melbourne is in FY2 now. It will be the interesting to see what happens with him. Thanks again fir your kind advice. Much appreciated.
The feasibility of the UK 8 year plan is limited by a few things:
1. Whether you actually end up with a UK internship after graduation which is NOT guaranteed given that you'd be lower priority as an international graduate. The UK just opened up a whole lot more medical school places (something like 25% increase in medical students) so you might end up with the short straw in terms of whether you actually land an internship. Difficult to predict what it's going to be like in 5 years, but I think it's possible the UK might end up with a bit of an oversupply. As a rough guide from this BBC article which is now 1+ years old:
Student doctor numbers to rise by 25%
- 2% increase is required to keep up with demand
- but medical school places will increase by 25% which seems like a much larger response than is necessary for the number of training places available?
2. What you actually want to specialise in if you are trying to get a registrar position in Australia. If you are looking to do something where demand for places is much lower than the supply of places (you can check which specialties are over and undersubscribed here:
Map My Health Career ) then it might be quite feasible to be able to do your training as a registrar here if the situation in 5-6 years time is similar to now. On the other hand, if you're looking to get into an oversubscribed specialty, you're going to be fighting an uphill battle (comparatively more uphill than someone who did internship/residency in Australia would be, that is). There is a bottleneck in training positions regardless, and it's not exactly getting any better at the moment (year on year it gets worse) so again your ability to come back here to practice as a registrar may be limited. That said, we could certainly do with more psychiatrists, chronic pain specialists, and geriatricians, for example - especially in rural or remote areas.
3. Or, if you don't get a registrar position in Australia - whether you'd be chosen over some UK citizen for their specialty training positions in whatever you happen to want to train in, and then whether you get some recognition of that in Australia (which as alluded to above is dependent on the relevant Royal Australian College of whatever it is). Given that a registrar position is a significant government funded investment (both in the UK and here) it's often the case that they will take the domestic over the international because they are more likely to stay within the country and serve the public in that specialty - what you are planning to do is one of the reasons why the UK would be less likely to choose you for the registrar positions.