Becoming a doctor in Australia was once straightforward.

You finished school, entered medical school and began the long apprenticeship of medicine while still young enough to regard six months in a distant country town as an adventure.

Now its a domestic crisis involving two rental properties, a partner left behind and negotiations with a childcare centre.

We have progressively replaced that model with graduate medicine, presumably believing that additional education and a few more years of life will produce more mature students and ultimately better doctors.

I am increasingly unconvinced that the bargain has been worthwhile.

Medicine remains, for all our examinations, competencies and increasingly elaborate curricula, fundamentally an apprenticeship.