‘Health ministers have been fed something toxic’: Medical board to begin fast-tracking overseas doctors from next week
Professor David Story believes AHPRA and the medical board will quickly find themselves out of their depth.
News that Australia had opened a new fast-track super-highway to import foreign specialists to fix its beleaguered health system resulted in a big exclusive for one of Sydney’s major newspapers on Monday.
It was probably what the nation’s health ministers had hoped for.
It came the same day as a Medical Board of Australia media release announcing that, next week, GPs with specialist qualifications from Ireland, the UK and New Zealand (see box below) could work as GPs in Australia without any formal assessment by ACRRM or the RACGP.
Currently, some 300 GPs from these countries are applying for specialist registration each year, having spent, according to the critics, thousands of dollars only to be stuck in a pointless bureaucratic queue.
