President of the Royal Australian College of General Practitioners, Dr Nicole Higgins, says government red tape is prohibiting Australia from securing critically needed medical graduates.
Many regional and rural parts of the country are skimping by with either part-time doctors, travel doctors or no healthcare service at all and Higgins told Dan Crouch on the Flow FM Country Viewpoint program that Australia is not winning the global race when it comes to securing international medical graduates.
“It's an incredibly difficult and costly process for doctors who've been trained overseas who want to work in Australia…it can take up to 18 months to 2 years to actually go through all the paperwork…at the moment, we've got a market where people want to come and work here and work in rural Australia and it's just incredibly difficult,” Higgins said.
Higgins said reducing red tape and having a more coordinated approach is the best way forward when it comes to greenlighting international medical graduates.
It happens sequentially...so we're asking to make sure that we all work together to see what can we all do to cut the red tape, to reduce the amount but also what can we all do at the same time to, you know, reduce the burden on these doctors,” Higgins said.
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