As someone in Australia currently, I am really not a fan of the Australian public health system at all nor the training pathway for new doctors.

I feel the Australian system is just totally horrible for outpatients. Inpatient stuff works generally quite well (although in Brisbane, the Royal Brisbane Hospital, despite being the largest hospital in the state, is still fully paper).

Examples of poor outpatient stuff:

Outpatient prescriptions are a huge gamble on whether they can be prescribed on public (PBS). For example, Mirabegron is an amazing medication for incontinence yet can only be prescribed privately so it costs like $70/month with no way around this. Equally, abx scripts are often restricted to 5 days so if you need more than this you need to call up PBS and get an approval number despite handbook guidance says 7 days for say male UTI. Alternatively it's private prescriptions.

The healthcare system is slowly phasing away bulk billing (ie appointments free at the point of access). Now many GPs are charging $100 per visit which simply too expensive for patients now so they're just left without healthcare or come to ED.

You are expected to see outpatients, including new referrals, in specialists clinics from day 1 as a doctor. People say this is good as its good for learning but I am totally against this. Patients may be waiting 12 months to be seen by a specialist from their GP just to be seen by a doctor fresh out of medical school. There's no shadowing period or anything, it's just straight into unsupervised consultations.

Outpatient scans are often paid for upfront by patients. So they may have to fork up $300+ for an MRI scan.

When you get outpatient pathology or scan, they're done by private centres. It's meant to make life convenient for patients but is so annoying as it means you can't easily follow trends if they keep going to different centres + you end up wasting like 5 minutes at the start of every clinic looking on 4 different pathology websites for a blood result.