New Paradigm in Clinical Education for South Australia
The Australian Medical Students' Association welcomes today's announcement that South Australian universities have been given $10 million by the Rudd Government under the Increased Clinical Training Capacity grants scheme to improve medical and allied health training in the state.
President of AMSA, and final year medical student at the University of Adelaide, Ross Roberts-Thomson said that the grants will permit students to train in a variety of community and private settings not traditionally used for training.
"This is an exciting new paradigm in clinical education for South Australia.
"With increasing numbers of medical and allied health students coming through the university system, these grants will provide some relief for traditional training facilities and go part-way to ensuring Australia's high standards of training are not compromised by swelling student numbers.
"Non-traditional locations such as rural settings and private hospitals and clinics have a lot to offer students in terms of training and AMSA is pleased that this is being increasingly recognised. Hopefully this is just the beginning of the relationship between universities and private health providers," said Mr Roberts-Thomson.
South Australia has been allocated $10 million dollars out of a national wide pool of $67.5 million which is to be shared between the University of Adelaide, Flinders University and the University of South Australia for specific projects.
AMSA President Ross Roberts-Thomson also said that work still needs to be done to improve training capacity in the heart of the medical student training arena - our public hospitals. And in addition to infrastructure, we must consider high quality quarantined teaching time with appropriately remunerated senior clinicians as crucial to medical student training. This too, must form part of the new order of medical education in Australia" said Mr Roberts-Thomson.
