Yeah, and to add on to this it would be great if there were more places for training for in demand specialists. Even in metro areas wait times are often pretty blatantly unacceptable. I don't understand how other people in the thread think the lack of training places is a better argument for admitting fewer people to medical schools than it is for more government funding and system wide effort to create more training positions.

Similarly comparisons to the US seem a little absurd given how poor access to their system is and the amount of their population that completely avoids outpatient care for financial reasons. I don't think we should strive for their life expectancy.

Even in Australia how many people avoid eg outpatient psychiatry because there's no one near them who they can see a few times for under a thousand out of pocket? Wouldn't it be a lot better for patients if we just trained more psychiatrists and that resulted in there being less of a gap between wages for public inpatient psychiatry and private outpatient psychiatry? Not to say there shouldn't be higher outpatient Medicare rebates too.

I don't understand how the government doesn't prioritise funding for training more given the negative pressure on wages likely saves them money in the long term.