Since coming to office, the Albanese Labor government has delivered on our commitment to open 137 Medicare urgent care clinics, with six clinics now open in the ACT, and we have made a record $8.5 billion investment to strengthen Medicare to deliver more bulk billing and more doctors and nurses so you can see a GP for free.
I know that this is making a real difference in my electorate of Bean as well as across the ACT. However, there is a catch. Being able to see a bulk-billing GP is reliant on being able to recruit the GPs to staff the clinics, and there are some puzzling barriers to recruitment.
We have seen more doctors join our health care system in the last two years than at any time in the past decade. There are more doctors registering to practice in Australia and record numbers of junior doctors are training to become GPs, but this takes time.
This pressure on the health workforce has quite a variety of causes, and I am certainly not suggesting there is one neat fix. But there is one part of it that is far easier to solve than we are making it.
I have recently spoken with doctors who trained in the EU, in some of the most well-regarded medical schools in the world, who wish to start working in our community. Unfortunately, they face significant hurdles and have to make their way through a set of hoops that does not really make much sense.
It struck me, however, that Europe sorted this out years ago. For example, a doctor who qualifies in France can practise in Germany automatically, or almost anywhere else in the European Union, because the member states agreed to recognise each other's qualifications. Thus, a GP from Paris is good enough for patients in Berlin, but apparently not good enough for patients in Tuggeranong without a long detour first.
The body that decides this is the Royal Australian College of General Practitioners. Before an overseas-trained doctor can work here as a GP, the college assesses their qualification, and as part of that it sorts the training systems of other countries into categories. Doctors who trained in France and Germany are not assessed as comparable to Australian-trained GPs, which means a long, costly road before they can see a single patient.
I put the question directly to the College. How exactly does the training in France or Germany fall short? They confirmed that these classifications are reviewed at least every five years, but I am still none the wiser on how French and German training falls short, or when it will be looked at again.
That is the part that bothers me. There is keeping standards high, which everyone wants, and then there is a process that is quite opaque. When doctors from countries with excellent hospitals and world-class universities are put through expensive and time-consuming hoops, and no one will say what is deficient in their training and experience, you start to wonder what the real reason is for the barriers to practice.
Our new trade deal with Europe provides us with an opportunity, but a deal on paper fixes nothing on its own. In March, after nearly eight years of negotiation, Australia and the EU finally landed on it. It is not only about tariffs on beef and dairy. It also includes commitments to make recognising professional qualifications easier, and that includes health.
The quality of our Australian Health system comes first, but just like is the current practice, a doctor who trained overseas still must get across how medicine works in Australia. Some extra training or a period under supervision is sensible. But I find it very hard to accept that a German-trained doctor is simply not up to the job.
Those doctors deserve a straight answer, and so do the patients sitting on waiting lists because of it.
This is bigger than Bean. Outer suburbs and country towns right across Australia lean on doctors who trained overseas. Every barrier to entry is someone in my electorate who cannot get an appointment, a clinic that cannot fill a job, a family making do with less care than they should have.
We know that we can't run our health system without overseas skilled workers. International medical graduates are key part of the health workforce with almost 19,800 of these doctors practicing in Australia since 2022. These GPs have migrated to Australia from countries like the United Kingdom, Ireland and New Zealand and we have fast tracked their pathway as well as the pathway for overseas trained nurses to work in our health system within a few months of their applications.
So what should we do? When a country's doctors are trained to a standard that genuinely matches ours, getting registered to practise here should be streamlined, and where we think they aren't, we should be able explain why in plain English. Implementation of the free trade agreement we have just struck with Europe gives us the impetus to make it happen.
We have qualified doctors who want to work here, and we have patients who need them. It is not too much to ask that the system standing between them makes sense.
