Australia’s private hospital sector stands ready to answer the Australian Medical Association’s call for more training places for early career doctors, with the sector already investing about $170 million in training doctors, nurses and allied health workers.

Australian Private Hospitals Association (APHA) CEO Mr Michael Roff said the sector had identified capacity and willingness to do more training, provided it was adequately supported.

“APHA and Catholic Health Australia released a report in May outlining the significant contribution to training our health workforce – increasing their investment in training by more than $130 million in the last decade.

“Private hospitals are committed to training and developing the professionals who work for them and with them to provide the highest quality health care to Australians.

“Private hospitals perform 60 percent of all surgeries in this country and in many specialties the proportion is higher. Therefore, it makes sense to expose doctors and nurses to the training opportunities private hospitals provide, particularly in relation to advanced surgical training,” he said.

Mr Roff said the ‘Education and training in the private hospital sector’ report identified opportunities for the private sector to do more.

“Dr Gannon rightly pointed out that Australia is training enough doctors, but the bottlenecks occur when they look for training places. The private sector has a proven track record in training, but often have to do this off their own bat. More supported placements would lessenthe training burden on the public system and increase opportunities for doctors in training.

“There is also a predicted nursing workforce shortage on the way, so we will continue to talk to government about how we can help to address that with more training places,” he said.

The report also recommended more and longer funding agreements between governments and the private sector to enable more training and develop strong partnerships among stakeholders and calls for collaboration between public and private hospital sectors as the key to increasing training opportunities.

To read the report: http://www.apha.org.au/wp-content/uploads/2017/05/APHA_WorkforceReport_FINAL_May17.pdf