Letters
General medicine Health services administration Medical education
Volume 216 - Issue 1

Improving knowledge and data about the medical workforce underpins healthy communities and doctors

Authors:  Helen I Keen, Claire Barrett and Catherine Hill

Med J Aust 2022; 216 (1): 53-53. || doi: 10.5694/mja2.51365
Published online: 17 January 2022
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To the Editor: As members of the Australian Rheumatology Association (ARA), we read with great interest the recent article by Russell and colleagues.1 The organisation has long been concerned that current training pathways and health care resourcing are resulting in a discordance between rheumatology health care supply in Australia and community needs. ARA believes the rheumatology workforce is in significant undersupply, ageing and largely focused in cities, and that our current training programs will not deal with these issues. A 2018 ARA survey of members found that 41% of respondents (of which 54.5% work at rural and remote clinics) plan to retire in the next 10 years.2 Our concerns are supported by Western Australian data3 reporting a critical shortfall of rheumatologists that trainee throughput will not address.

However, accessing accurate national data has been difficult due to the issues outlined by Russell et al.1 For example, Australian Health Practitioner Regulation Agency (Ahpra) data suggest there are 441 practising rheumatologists in Australia, but the ARA is only able to identify 364 (including non‐members).4 In addition, understanding the community demand for care has been challenging, as this might be assessed through the surrogate of numbers of people on waiting lists, but there is heterogeneity of the referral acceptance guidelines and data collection processes.

To this end, ARA has recently partnered with the Public Health Information Development Unit at Torrens University to define the rheumatology workforce in Australia, analyse interaction effects, and understand the relationships across public and private settings. This needs to be linked to disease prevalence data and geographic service area to understand supply and demand. We also need to understand the selection into the training process and pathways in order to drive policy addressing our suspected workforce problems.

We strongly believe that any workforce planning research should engage and partner with specialty societies; for example, we believe that ARA is best placed to engage our members to aid understanding of their career choices and practice patterns. We encourage other specialty groups to follow suit and the Royal Australasian College of Physicians to consider their leadership role in this area.

 

Authors

  • Helen I Keen1,2,3
  • Claire Barrett4
  • Catherine Hill5,6,7
  • 1. Fiona Stanley Hospital, Perth, WA
  • 2. Royal Perth Hospital, Perth, WA
  • 3. University of Western Australia, Perth, WA
  • 4. Redcliffe and Northside Rheumatology, Brisbane, QLD
  • 5. Queen Elizabeth Hospital, Adelaide, SA
  • 6. Royal Adelaide Hospital, Adelaide, SA
  • 7. University of Adelaide, Adelaide, SA

Correspondence: helen.keen@uwa.edu.au

Competing interests

Helen Keen has received educational support form AbbVie and Roche, and speaker’s fees from Roche, Sanofi and Jansen. Her unit conducts clinical trials with Abbvie, Sanofi, Sun and Emerald.

References

Linked content

  • MJA Perspective: Improving knowledge and data about the medical workforce underpins healthy communities and doctors

  • InSight+: Track doctors or continue to get workforce planning wrong

View this article on Wiley Online Library