Andrew Laming (Bowman, Liberal Party, Shadow Parliamentary Secretary for Regional Health Services and Indigenous Health) Share this | Hansard source

I hope that 20-second interruptions was worth the effort because patients in rural Australia will pay the price for that silly stunt. The key issue here is getting a workforce out to central, remote and rural Australia. We need state Labor health bureaucracies to work with the colleges, not against them. That is what we saw in Cairns. I do not want to comment on individual cases when I do not know all of the facts, but I do know one thing: PESCIs, the pre-employment structured clinical interviews, were not introduced to pass or fail doctors; or to guillotine their health careers in this country after they gave up lives, work and careers overseas to come and serve Australia in some of the toughest and most high need areas. They were introduced to assess whether doctors could move from areas of certain risk to areas of high risk—from where they might be working in a hospital to where they might be working more independently as a GP. That should be the issue.

I think it is only fair that members on this side of the chamber ask the question about these PESCIs: have they been adequately evaluated? Are they targeting the doctors that genuinely are clinical threats to rural and remote Australia or are they being used for some other purpose? What we do not want to see is a situation where state bureaucracies can say, ‘Sorry, no job here,’ and then a clinical college says, ‘Well, if there’s no job we can’t help you, sir.’ We want their heads butted together so they find solutions and are not being antagonistic.

I want to say something quite simple, and that is: ‘If you want to be the only specialist college in the country, you have a service obligation to make sure this nation is adequately provided with those doctor specialists or allied health practitioners.’ That is not a big request. We want to know that if people do come from around the world to serve in Australia that it is done fairly. We do not need a mountain of bureaucracy for the sake of bureaucracy. It is one thing to create a single registration board for the nation but quite another to use PESCIs as a way of further interfering with clinical provision. Without saying that in any individual case that is occurring, I would like to know that these PESCIs are being fairly and adequately evaluated.

In this great battle of assessing overseas qualifications, we have always found it very difficult to evaluate medical schools according to the level of quality of their graduates. Yet I note Australian universities do that all the time. They will only accept Indian graduates from tier 1 and tier 2 Indian universities to study at selected universities. We do not do the same thing with doctors. We pay an enormous price because we put English trained GPs, from high-quality institutions, through a complete rigmarole that is utterly unnecessary and serves only to damage health provision in remote areas. I believe if graduates are trained in an English-speaking university there is no need to tie up those graduates who arrive here to test them in their levels of English. If we are going to do IELTS tests, put them to clinical supervised work if they have an IELTS of six and let them show that they have adequate English, because they are working with a supervisor. Why not get them to work? Don’t use the PESCI as a way of interfering with that. I would like to see stalemates like we have seen in Cairns resolved rapidly. I would like to see PESCIs adequately evaluated. They were never meant to be pass/fail; they were meant to be indicative and be drawing attention to areas where clinical skills were inadequate. That is what we need to move towards—an area where the administration is no longer used as a way of putting brakes on clinicians but it is used as a way of identifying those who can practise safely in the bush.

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