Ten years ago, AusDoc wrote about the medical profession’s ghosts, the IMGs being brought in en masse to work as GPs in the rural and remote communities where few doctors wanted to go.

Isolated professionally and geographically, many were often exploited, with supervision done by phone with someone they barely knew and had probably never met.

This arrangement was the business model of enterprises like Tristar, at least until the rural corporate went belly up in 2022 when the Medical Board of Australia toughened up the supervision rules to make the relationships real.

The existence of IMGs in the shadowlands was a result of being rendered mute by their tenuous predicament — their visas and therefore their futures, dependent on their employer, the colleges, the medical board itself.