lol
Again, it goes beyond what I'm capable of answering.
Best place to look into radiology would be the college website:
http://www.ranzcr.edu.au/img-a-aon/overview
(that's the webpage they have for IMGs). And they have a faq:
http://www.ranzcr.edu.au/img-a-aon/resources/frequently-asked-questions
(take the following with a grain of salt - i've only rotated through rural hospitals, but never worked in a radiology department. My interaction with radio is from department meetings and making referrals)
Generally - rural hospitals vary greatly. It does depend on who the consultant (or attending) running the departments are. They are the ones that develop those departments, whether or not research is done is up to them. some do, some don't. some have radiology registrars, some don't. I don't know which are particularly research friendly, if they have research, it will be rural focussed.
The regional or larger rural hospitals are more likely to have what you're after. however, the larger the rural or regional area, the less years it takes off for you in the moratorium.
Any tertiary site will have research, that's almost definite. That's how they obtain their positions in tertiary sites, where those positions are especially competitive to have. It also gives them the ability to recruit more patients to studies, so they have the capacity to run major clinical trials. Occasionally a regional town, like Townsville in QLD has an actual tertiary hospital. even though Townsville is not considered a city like Cairns or Brisbane in that state.
(*bonus to QLD rural hospitals, if you pick the right one, you get to live on a tropical beach)
if you have the opportunity to attend conferences (international ones) find out who the Australian radiologists are and make connections there. another alternative is to find out if any radiologist in Sweden has Australian connections - i.e. they did some fellowships in Australia before or are collaborating on research.
Maybe easier if you were to target your area of interest.
If it's interventional radiology you're interested in, Monash in Melbourne does a lot of that, like clot retrieval in stroke patients.
It's possible to do dual training - however, I rarely hear of GP and radiology combos, I'm not actually sure it exists but it something to ask the colleges if you decide on doing GP trainee. (usually it's rural GP-emergency, GP obstetrics or GP anaesthetics)
Rural GP, even registrar (trainee) ones, can be really easy to find depending on the rural area. There's a lot of GP run mini hospitals. Rural gp is..not like city GP. It's more flexible in terms of what you can do. For e.g. if you have Emergency medicine experience, you could be running a small rural hospital's emergency department part time. most rural and remote areas are still in desperate for doctors, so sometimes the practices or rural hospitals will go out of their way to get you there.
while this remains the easiest way into the country, whether this will help you on your path to radiology, I don't really know. it's much less direct. there's not a whole lot of research that rural GPs do and you've even less opportunities to make connections to radiologists.
Purely speculating here, but it's maybe easier to start over as an intern or resident in a hospital where you can do research in radiology on the side with the radiologist based in the hospital. Or just finishing your training at home and doing either a fellowship or specialist img pathway. As GP, you're still at least based in the community half the time in the clinics.
College of general practice:
http://www.racgp.org.au/home
College of rural medicine:
http://www.acrrm.org.au/home
Just realized I forgot to directly address this:
Can you get a specialization place in Radiology in Australia if you can work in rural areas? - - I just want to have good mentors.
goes back to what i was saying before. you can, but it's hard, in so many ways.
Even some of the locally trained Aussie MDs have trouble with this. Radiology is so competitive nowadays. there's a glut of junior doctors and med students, many of them wanting the exact same things as you do.
As an IMG..your easiest way is rural if you want training let's say, and you end up spending years trying to work your way up in rotations with no relation to radiology. that's what some of the IMGs i've known have done. They may spend
years working as a psychiatry resident in hospital, establishing themselves, making themselves known, before they can become a surgical resident for another few
years, then apply for surgical training. How it works in Australia is that you work as a resident in various rotations before you can even apply for vocational training. Everyone is expected to do that.
why it's harder to go to tertiary hospital in a city - depending on the state, they use priority groups to select residents. It's based on citizenship and whether you have an IMG degree or not. IMGs end up being the last on the list of consideration. some hospitals may not even look at IMG applicants because they already have too many domestic graduates to choose from. to the point where grads with Australian degrees must go rural too. some aren't able to return to cities they want to go to for years, ending up in rural for a while or having to move to a different state.
most hospitals in Australia, are loyal to their own residents and like to rehire them (they like to the pick the ones that have been shown to be reliable and an asset to the hospital they don't want to lose. it's easier to hire who you know, than someone neither you nor any of your staff can vouch for. there's variability in residents too, with respect to their own individual work ethics).
it can also hard for Aussie residents to move between states, depending on the state. Tasmania and North Territories are going to be less popular than new south wales or victoria.
There's just a massive effect in general on workforce because there's too many junior doctors right now. I can't even pretend like there isn't, because everyone feels the effect of this. In like multiple 'dimensions'
