Australia Is Desperate For Doctors - So Why Are We Putting Them Through a System That Keeps Them Out While Patients Suffer

 Australia Is Desperate for Doctors. So Why Are We Making It So Hard for Them to Practise?

There is something deeply wrong when a country is crying out for doctors, patients are waiting months or years for operations, and people with serious medical conditions are left waiting for care ,yet qualified doctors from overseas can spend years trying to get through the system that allows them to practise here.

On the west coast of Australia, the shortage of doctors is not an abstract political debate. It affects real people, real families and real lives. Behind every long waiting list is someone in pain, someone whose condition may be deteriorating, and someone wondering how much longer they can afford to wait.

So why are we making it so difficult for overseas-trained doctors to help? I know of a Malaysian medical graduate who has spent her life achieving the highest academic results. Since the age of four, she has consistently achieved high distinctions. She has now sat the Australian medical assessment for the second time. On both occasions, she missed passing by just one point. Last week, she received her latest result. She was part of a group of 24 candidates, including doctors from Malaysia, the UK and other countries. According to what I have been told, not one of the 24 candidates passed. Twenty-four people. Not one pass.

Of course, one group's experience does not prove that an examination is unfair, and academic excellence alone cannot establish whether someone is ready to practise medicine safely. Patient safety must always come first.

But when an entire group fails, and an individual comes within one point of passing on two separate occasions, surely we should be asking questions. Are these examinations genuinely identifying gaps in clinical competence? Are they testing the skills that matter most to patients? Is the assessment process proportionate, consistent and transparent? And how many capable doctors are we losing because the pathway is so difficult, expensive and demoralising?

I am not suggesting that Australia should abandon medical standards or allow people to practise without appropriate assessment. I am asking whether there are better ways to ensure those standards are met. Could more doctors be assessed through supervised practice in Australian hospitals and regional communities? Could experienced overseas-trained doctors receive targeted training in areas where they fall short? Could the system offer clearer feedback, greater transparency around marking and a more effective route to reassessment?

These are not unreasonable questions. They are urgent ones. Every doctor who enters the Australian workforce must be safe and competent. But patient safety must also include recognising the harm caused when people cannot access timely medical care. We cannot keep talking about doctor shortages while ignoring the barriers that prevent potentially capable doctors from joining the workforce. We cannot ask patients to accept long waits for treatment without examining every reasonable opportunity to increase the number of safe, qualified practitioners available to care for them.

And we should not dismiss the experiences of overseas-trained doctors who feel they are doing everything possible to meet Australian requirements, only to fall short by the narrowest of margins. If Australia needs doctors so desperately, shouldn't we be asking whether our system is doing enough to help competent doctors demonstrate that they are ready to practise? Perhaps the real question is not whether medical standards should be maintained. Of course they should.

The question is whether we can maintain those standards while creating a fairer, faster and more transparent pathway for doctors who want to contribute. Because while systems, assessments and policies grind on, patients are still waiting. And for some of them, waiting is not just frustrating. It can change their lives forever

The statistics raise serious questions The Australian Medical Council's own annual reports reveal the scale of the challenge facing overseas-trained doctors. In 2022–23, 2,053 international medical graduates sat the AMC Clinical Examination, and only 426 passed, a pass rate of approximately 21%. 

In 2023–24, 2,107 candidates sat the clinical examination and 509 passed, increasing the reported pass rate to approximately 24%. The written Multiple Choice Question examination also presented a significant hurdle: its pass rate increased from 47% in 2022–23 (2,119 passes from 4,468 candidates) to 51% in 2023–24 (3,234 passes from 6,331 candidates). In March 2024, the AMC changed the clinical examination pass requirement from 10 out of 14 scored stations to 9 out of 14, following an extensive review. The 2023–24 results span a period that includes this change, so they cannot be used to measure its impact independently. These figures are examination outcomes, not the proportion of individual doctors who permanently fail, because some candidates sit examinations more than once. Nevertheless, they raise an important public-interest question: when Australia urgently needs more doctors, is the assessment system providing a sufficiently fair, transparent and efficient way for capable overseas-trained doctors to demonstrate that they can practise safely? The AMC itself reported in November 2024 that 77% of surveyed Standard Pathway participants took more than a year to complete the process, with examination difficulties and finding suitable employment among the main causes of delay. Official sources: AMC 2022–23 Annual Report: [https://www.amc.org.au/wp-content/uploads/2023/11/AMC-2022-23-Annual-Report.pdf](<https://www.amc.org.au/wp-content/uploads/2023/11/AMC-2022-23-Annual-Report.pdf>) https://www.amc.org.au/wp-content/uploads/2024/11/AMC-2023-24-Annual-Report.pdf](<https://www.amc.org.au/wp-content/uploads/2024/11/AMC-2023-24-Annual-Report.pdf>)[https://www.amc.org.au/news-and-updates/change-to-pass-requirement-for-the-clinical-examination/](<https://www.amc.org.au/news-and-updates/change-to-pass-requirement-for-the-clinical-examination/>) https://www.amc.org.au/news-and-updates/international-medical-graduate-experiences-survey-report/