Rural clinical schools designed to encourage medical students to take up rural practice have failed to increase the proportion of Australian medical graduates moving to work outside the major cities, according to Charles Sturt University (CSU) medical consultant Emeritus Professor John Dwyer.
 
 
“Despite the sterling efforts of medical staff in rural Australia to help train medical students, city medical schools are not achieving their goal,” Professor Dwyer said.
 
 
Many medical schools at metropolitan universities established rural clinical schools more than a decade ago in the hope that providing Australian medical students with a rural experience would encourage more city medical graduates to work in rural areas.
 
 
But Professor Dwyer said the most recent meeting of the Federation of Rural Australian Medical Educators, including representatives from all the major city medical schools, has shown the schools were not making any real difference to the number of rural doctors.
 
 
“At the beginning of the meeting every Rural Clinical School was asked to report its most outstanding achievement for 2012,” Professor Dwyer said.
 
 
“Not one city medical school was able to report that their efforts had seen an increase in the number of doctors actually working in rural practice.
 
 
“The Rural Clinical Schools were established to significantly increase the number of doctors actually working in rural areas, so it is astonishing that not a single one of them was able to point to any hard evidence of success in this field.
 
 
“This will be a blow for rural communities desperately fighting to get doctors to keep their local hospitals, maternity units and health centres operating.”
 
 
Professor Dwyer said nearly half the GPs working in rural areas were trained overseas, and rural communities would become more reliant on recruiting doctors from outside Australia in the future if current policies were maintained.
 
 
“The only ‘achievement’ rural communities want to see is more Australian-trained doctors working in rural Australia, yet city medical schools are not providing the evidence to show that this is happening,” he said.
 
 
“In a nutshell we need medical schools that have a track record of recruiting rural students who want a rural medical career” said Professor Dwyer.
 
 
Charles Sturt University is waiting on a response from the Federal Government to the recommendations of the cross-party Senate Committee, which recommended the establishment of a new medical school at the University to address the chronic shortages of GPs and specialists in rural practice.