One of the most common and surprising
questions I get is do doctors get paid to train in Australia.
Hi there, I'm Dr. Anthony Llewellyn.
I'm a real Doctor. I am the Career doctor.
I'm here to help you with your medical career challenge,
whether it be on YouTube, Facebook, LinkedIn or other platforms.
So the purpose of this video is to provide
you with an answer to the question, do doctors get paid to train in Australia.
And I'm going to do that very shortly for you.
But I wanted to also take the time to answer some related questions to this
question, like, do international doctors get paid to train in Australia?
Why do trainee doctors get paid in Australia?
And do you have to pay to train in Australia?
And going back to international doctors?
Again, do they get paid differently in Australia?
So please watch all the way through
to the end to get all the answers to these topics.
Now, I run a YouTube channel which has comments.
Obviously. I have a very helpful blog site that has comments turned on.
I run a Facebook group where you can ask
questions, and I frankly have way too many other ways for people to contact me.
So it's not surprising that I do get a lot of questions and queries on a daily basis.
And one of the surprising to me,
common and interesting questions that I do get from a lot of doctors from other
countries is doctors get paid to train in Australia.
Now, being paid for work is part of our culture in Australia,
but I am aware that other systems you may not necessarily be paid when you train
in parts of medicine, or you might even have to pay for your training.
So let's try to clear up this question
once and for all before giving you a more detailed explanation.
Along with answering some of those related
questions that come up around this particular topic.
Doctors do get paid to train in Australia
from the time after you graduate from medical school,
which I'm calling studies in Australia, you will be entitled to and will receive
payment for your services working as a doctor.
So this includes any further career stage
which might be referred to under the label of training.
So you get paid to be an intern, you get paid to be a resident medical
officer, and you get paid to be a Registrar, which is what most doctors
who are undertaking specialty training in Australia are referred to as.
Therefore, you also get paid when you are
doing surgical training, physician training, psychiatry training,
emergency training, Journal, practise training, et cetera.
And of course, you also get paid when you become a specialist doctor or consultant,
often quite handsomely, as I pointed out in other videos,
although in some cases you may now be working for yourself,
in which case I guess you cannot pay yourself, but you're probably paying
yourself out of the revenue that you collect yourself.
So why doctors get paid to train in Australia?
The answer to the question of why doctors
get paid whilst training is that these doctors are performing real
and substantial services in the roles that they are in.
Yes, this is very important.
So like in other professions in Australia, such as engineering or the law or
accounting, after you obtain your basic qualifications through a University
degree, you move into a workforce position, but you are still learning.
It's just that you're now learning
on the job and you may well do additional formal training and obtain additional
qualifications to improve on that expertise.
So in postgraduate medical training,
the training is on top of the work you do or embedded into this work.
For example, you are training when you're
assisting a surgeon to perform an operation and having an opportunity
to learn about that operation and even practise elements of it.
At this career stage, doctors are generally not taking large
amounts of time away from the clinical work that they are doing in the workplace
to attend things like lectures and seminars and workshops, etc.
For much of the training actually occurs within the workplace and a lot
of the additional studying occurs in the doctor's own time after work.
And doctors also have to pay for a lot of this training.
Hang on, what's that?
You just said that doctors get paid
to train, but now you're saying they're also having to pay for training.
What's up with that?
Well, doctors do get paid to train in Australia, but there are some costs
associated with being a trainee doctor in Australia.
There are of course,
the normal regular costs of being a doctor, like paying your medical
registration every year and paying to have a car so you can get to work.
But there are also some specific costs associated with being a trainee doctor.
As an intern, you generally won't have any
particular extra costs associated with the train as a training will normally
be provided exclusively for you by the hospital.
At the next stage,
a resident medical officer's stage, however, you will probably be thinking
about paying for some additional training yourself, for example,
for courses that might help you get into a particular training programme.
So things like emergency courses
and anatomy courses and radiology courses alike.
As a specialty training doctor,
you'll definitely have to pay things like College membership fees.
You may also have to pay for a formal
education course and you will have to pay the state examination.
Personal costs for training as a training
doctor in Australia can rack up to several thousand dollars and even pass
into the tens of thousands of dollars range throughout the full training period.
But this is generally over a significant
period of time of around five to ten years.
So, for example, for psychiatry training
doctors, there are a number of additional costs.
Firstly, with the College,
there's an initial registration fee that is currently $702 Australia.
There is also an annual training fee
that is 1864 Australian dollars for a full time trainee.
And then there are several fees for sitting exams and submitting
assessments that you can see outlined here on this page.
On top of this, psychiatry trainees are expected to attend a formal education
programme for their stage one and stage Two training.
There's three stages in psychiatry
and a number of the advanced training programmes which occur in stage three.
Also expect you to attend a formal
education programme, so some psychiatry training programmes
provide this to you for free, but in many cases there is a charge.
As an example,
the Hetty Psychiatric Medicine Postgraduate Course is $3,000 for a three
year course for New South career doctor, but this is probably one of the cheaper
options available and some of them are in the thousands of dollars per year.
Psychiatry trainees will often pay additional money for things like
examination preparation courses as do many other specialty trained needs.
Sightseeing is one of the popular
organisations providing exam prep courses in psychiatry.
So here's an unsolicited shout out
to my colleague Sonny Orego who runs Cyclone Cyclones offers various live
and online courses starting from $595 Australia.
So what does all of the above mean for international medical graduates or IMG?
Do I AMC doctors get paid to train in Australia?
Well, the answer is if you're an IMG
doctor and you get appointed to any training position in Australia.
Whether this is a resident position
for the purposes of completing the standard pathway process or
a specialty training Registrar type position as part of any of the following
Competent Authority pathway, the Specialist pathway or the short term
training in a medical specialty pathway, you will get paid
now whilst wage theft and the exploitation of overseas workers in Australia has
become a real concern here over the past decade or so, I'm not aware of any such
situations that have involved international medical grade.
If you do know of such a circumstance, I would be interested to hear from you.
You can put something in the comments below.
The answer to whether IMG doctors get paid
differently to Australian doctors is a more complicated question to answer.
As a general rule, if you're an IMG doctor
and you are recruited to a physician, you'll be paid under the same
classification as any Australian doctor who is also doing the same job as you.
So for example,
you are appointed to a resident position, you'll be paid as a resident.
However, for most classifications
there are steps or levels that increase based on your years of experience.
So sometimes the employer may try to start you out at the bottom of this
classification scale even though you may actually have more experience.
And the reason they might say for that is
that you don't have any experience in Australia.
So in this case you may end up being paid slightly less or maybe significantly less.
So for example, in New South Wales if you got appointed to an RMO position and let's
say you already have ten years experience in your own country,
you might be offered to start off as a first year resident rather than a fourth
year resident in which case there's going to be a significant pay gap difference
of almost 30,000 Australian dollars per year.
Thankfully in my experience however,
most employers in Australia will try to recognise your overseas experience
and pay you at a reasonable rate if you are eligible for it.
But this is a grey area in terms of what is the correct thing to do.
So it's definitely worth querying things
if you feel that you have ended up on the wrong end of the stick and I would
be interested in hearing from any doctors other trainees or overseas in the comments
below if they've been given a poor pay deal at any point in time.
Also whether you are an IMG doctor or an Australian trained doctor,
remember that I have lots of helpful resources over on the advanced medium main
blog site as well as services to help you out on my services site we're which is
my advancemed.com au please subscribe and follow it really helps me to get these
videos up and I will see you in another video.