Current Situation of Internship Shortage

[Inorganic]

Hi, could anyone please update me on information related to internship position shortage in Australia, especially in Queensland? And what do you think the future will be like for international students in Australia). I will start in 2015 at UQ.

Is there any statistics of this year (i.e., graduating 2014 and starting internship in 2015)? I have read the "Australian 2015 Ballot" thread. But I would like to know if there is any update on the details of the final results, like how many international students eventually failed to secure any position in Australia?

I will start my study in Australia in 2015 as an international student. A lot of my family members are living and working there. And I will certainly try to apply for my PR to join them during my med school years. But as an adult child (I was not born or raised in Australia), it won't be easy for me to get permanent residency smoothly. (Yeah...I can try to find an Australian spouse, but this is not something I can control...) Therefore, I think it will still be quite hard for me to get an internship according to current situation.

I searched for news online. But most of the news talking about the issue were back in 2012 (or "warnings" copied from previous years). So, it would be very helpful if anyone who is already in the system can tell me more. And is it a bad sign there is few news related to this issue? Do people give up dealing with it?

For current student who knows more about the current situation, did you see any effort to try to solve the internship shortage problem? Do you think they will be effective?

Is the situation getting better or worsening? 4 years later, will it be more difficult than now or totally impossible for me to get an internship if I failed my application for my PR? Can anyone make some prediction based on what you can observe now?

Since I don't have a better option and I do look forward to getting closer to my family members in Australia, please do not only discourage me from attending this school. I really need your opinions to be better prepared.

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[pitman]

There are a number of threads addressing most of your questions. You will find confident forecasts made by the worst of scaremongerers to the equally deluded blindly optimistic. My advice is to look primarily at past data and current trends and to treat forecasts with extreme skepticism. I'd say the most important developments to understand are simply the more general ones: the massive past increase in grad numbers and creation of internship spots (with implications for training opportunities), a recent levelling off of increases in expected grad numbers that *can* be accommodated *if* Commonwealth-supported spots continue; the two-year "trend" of Commonwealth-supported spots that have plugged recent state shortages; and no COAG or otherwise nation-wide announcement/agreement of any import aside from an understanding that student numbers cannot sustainably increase. A great source for objective data and data-driven forecasts is the annual Medical Training Review Panel (MTRP) report.

As to 2015 internship, we are in the middle of state Ballots, and past years demonstrate that middle-of-the-cycle data does not help in making confident predictions. There will be no final numbers to report until next year (it is still not known whether there will be Commonwealth supported spots, for example; it is also not known whether Qld will in future years increase the priority of its own int'ls students to above those of out-of-state domestic students, but there are efforts being made to do this -- the politics have yet to play out).

That there are not headline news reports this year, yet, is testament to improved media behavior -- in recent years, reports were made prematurely in the season almost universally claiming doomsday, pushed by special interest groups but proving to be wrong. The next important announcement will be how many int'ls are without a spot at the end of Round 2 of the Ballot (which ended Aug 1 but numbers won't be known for some time), yet such numbers will continue to decrease over the next few months and will serve only to help anticipate the next important announcement: if/how many Commonwealth supported spots will be made available to int'ls, which would necessarily be a smaller number and won't tell us much until it is known how many of *those* spots are taken up by int'ls by early next year, and if all of them, then how many int'ls applied for but did not get one. So really, we won't know diddly until next year. But then the cycle of uncertainty repeats.

My two cents' worth of short-term (over the next few years) forecasting, if I were asked to place bets: numbers will continue to be flat as projected (2:1 odds); there will continue to be Commonwealth supported spots to allow the bulk of int'ls to stay by doing internship primarily in private hospitals (3:1 odds); and specialty training spots will become increasingly merit-based and difficult to get, with a resulting increased average number of years spent by junior docs as hospital house officers (4:1 odds) and about 50% (up from ~40%) of them expected to become GPs (8:1 odds).

As a result, and as has been the case since I started med in 2004, you will likely not be confident about your chances of staying until you are a senior med student, and maybe not even then. Student number trends could change, the politics and economic state of Australia and Queensland will have changed, internship programs could be engineered quite differently, and your PR status could even change. Then again, other overseas opportunities may take hold of you. So be aware: absent a supreme confidence (that you could successfully compete to stay here in a worst-case scenario), or a classically romantic vision for your life, you would likely adopt some form of dissociation that prevents you from fully immersing in Australia as you *prepare* for leaving via the USMLE and/or MCCQE. Choose your method wisely!