Media release from the Medical Training Board

New Zealand should be training more doctors as part of a wider approach to meeting the changing and growing needs of our health system.

The Medical Training Board is suggesting medical schools create an extra 100 places over the next four years, although Chair Len Cook says this is one part of a complex response to meet the country's future medical workforce needs.

"The focus of the MTB is predominantly how we train doctors, but ensuring we have enough of them in 25-30 years means there are many other factors to consider relating to how they are employed and work.

"We need to better coordinate training in universities and hospitals, and we need to make sure that training is matched with evolving models of patient care, especially the move to clinical networks and the focus on primary health."

Mr Cook says keeping more of the doctors we train is also important. "If we were able to keep one out of every five doctors currently leaving the workforce, we would gain the equivalent of an extra medical school year intake every 15 years.

"That involves looking at how our doctors are employed and making sure they have opportunities to grow and develop professionally."

The MTB says its work sits alongside a great variety of initiatives aimed at giving our health service a greater capacity to respond to changing needs.  "Our proposals involve the training of the workforce that will deliver those services and we believe they have significant consequences for the future quality and adaptability of New Zealand's health service."

The MTB has produced recommendations and three discussion papers and will consult widely over the next three to six months before developing firm recommendations early next year.

"We hope our work will be the catalyst for the healthy debate needed to ensure we have a robust, flexible, integrated medical training system to meet the future workforce needs."

Medical Training Board

The Medical Training Board was established at the end of October 2007 (by the Minister of Health and the Minister for Tertiary Education) to look at medical education and training and future medical workforce needs.  

During 2007/08 the Training Board identified as its objective: the provision of a system that will provide the right number of doctors, of the right type, in the right location to deliver the right care to New Zealanders.  The discussion documents released today can be found on  http://www.moh.govt.nz/moh.nsf/indexmh/future-of-the-medical-workforce