Medical training takes too long: Garling

Australia’s inefficient medical training system will need a radical overhaul to keep pace with demand, the medical profession has been told. Peter Garling SC, who last year chaired a 10-month inquiry into NSW hospitals that led to him make 139 recommendations to the State Government, gave an address at a RACP forum in Sydney on Wednesday night in which he called for a revamp of Australia’s “haphazard” medical training system. In particular the 14-16 years it currently took to train specialists was too long, he said, and would eventually become unsustainable as an ageing population led to increasing levels of chronic disease. Undergraduate programs comprising just eight months of study per year could be condensed, he said. “The leisurely progress through university of the 19th Century is no longer, in my view, appropriate if we are attempting to develop a sustainable health care system,” he said. He added: “I remain to be convinced that it is not possible that the postgraduate years of experience in hospital and the first years of specialist training cannot be collapsed so that they coincide.” Mr Garling also highlighted the inconsistencies between different institutions when training specialists, comparing them to a 40 member orchestra “where each of the 40 players do not have a copy of the full musical score for the entire symphony and there is no conductor of the orchestra.” “The time is approaching where unless some significant change is undertaken in this crucial area, then the future of good medical education and training and the sufficiency of health services to an appropriate standard of quality and safety, will be at risk,” he said....