Reports and Statements

The transition from medical school to internship is a critically important time for medical students – and also a time of high stress and anxiety levels for many.  

Creating a Culture of Support considers how medical schools, students and hospitals can work together to ensure students feel safe to share information with their new employers about their individual physical and mental health support needs when they transition to practice.  

Before students are prepared to share that information, they need to trust it will only be used by their employers to make workplace adjustments and provide the additional support these students and graduates require. 

The Medical Deans Australia and New Zealand (Medical Deans) Indigenous Health Strategy 2021-2025 (the Strategy) expresses the strong commitment of Medical Deans and medical schools in Australia and New Zealand to equitable health outcomes for Indigenous people, through medical education and medical workforce development.

Medical Deans recognises the substantial and unacceptable inequity in health and social outcomes for Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples and Māori. These are a legacy of colonisation, dispossession and marginalisation, and are manifest in the social and environmental determinants of health, including education, employment, income, and personal and community agency. Institutional racism and implicit biases persist in society more broadly, as well as in medical education, by health professionals, and within systems of health care; and Medical Deans individually and as a collective are committed to playing an active role to stamp out these biases and behaviours.

We also recognise the strengths and resilience of Indigenous peoples in Australia and New Zealand and the value of Indigenous peoples’ knowledge, culture and traditions. We are committed to shifting the discourse from a deficit model – which itself causes harm – to one based on strengths and self-determination. We are committed to working in partnership with, and being guided by, Indigenous leaders, organisations, communities and individuals, on our thinking and our work.

This Discussion Paper sets out Medical Deans’ vision for a medical education and training continuum that leads to an adaptable and supported workforce with the required capabilities, and in the right numbers, right places, and right specialties to serve the needs of the people of Australia and New Zealand.  

As our populations’ health needs change, so too must our models and settings of care and how we train our future doctors. We need a greater focus on generalist skills, teamwork, preventive and long-term care, and working across traditional care boundaries. We need to teach skills and build experience in adapting to ongoing disruption and innovation. We need students and graduates learning in and for our communities, in an education and training system that actively supports paths to careers in the regions and specialties where they’re most needed. Underpinning all of this we need a healthy workplace environment, with embedded systems that safeguard patient care and the health of students and doctors. 

In this paper we layout our ideas and recommendations to support this much-needed shift. We seek to engage and partner with health services, student associations, medical colleges, regulators, representative bodies, and Australian and New Zealand governments to share and progress these ideas, and co-develop a medical education and training continuum that can better meet the future health needs of our populations and better support our future doctors. 

The Medical Deans report ‘Changing for Good: What We Learned in 2020’ charts the early impacts of COVID-19 on medical education in Australia and New Zealand. It explores members’ views of how we might build on some of the innovation and collaboration that occurred, to embed and further drive improvements in medical education and training.

Whilst the impact of the pandemic on medical education was immense and costly – both financially and personally for everyone involved – such a scale of disruption provided a unique opportunity for step-change. Medical Deans and medical schools want to capitalise on the resourcefulness and innovation of 2020 in the ways highlighted in this report.

To fully realise the potential on offer, we seek to work in partnership with all those involved: students, health services, prevocational training, specialist colleges, regulators, and governments.

This document provides advice, potential resources, and a suggested framework for medical schools to consider in their approach to building greater inclusivity within their culture, systems, and environment to support students with a disability. 

COVID-19 brought about rapid changes, ongoing uncertainties and new teaching approaches in medical education across Australia and New Zealand. The disruption caused by COVID-19 also brought the importance of professionalism to the forefront and highlighted the challenges in defining, teaching, assessing professionalism, and effectively remediating unprofessional behaviour.  

To support the medical educators and clinical supervisors at our member schools in response to the COVID-19 pandemic, the Medical Education Collaborative Committee of Medical Deans established a working group who were tasked with providing practical guidance about how professionalism and professional identity is taught and assessed in the medical program, particularly when navigating the changes brought about by COVID-19.  

This report, Professionalism and professional identity of our future doctors, provides an overview of the current approaches to how professionalism is defined, taught, assessed, and remediated across Australian and New Zealand medical schools; common challenges and systemic issues; suggestions on potential areas for future collaboration and further research; and suggested useful resources. 

MDANZ surveyed medical schools in Australia and New Zealand in 2019, to gain a better understanding of the degree to which they include research education and skills training in the curriculum. 21 of the schools responded and the results shine a light on what is happening in medical program research.

Data from final year students at medical schools across Australia highlights the continuing trend of more graduates wanting a career working outside capital cities, with over a third stating that is their preference.

This report from a forum held on Thursday 31st August convened jointly between the Council of Presidents of Medical Colleges and the Medical Deans of Australia and New Zealand with representation from the Australian Department of Health. The purpose of the forum was to build on work that has already been done, identify champions for change and establish a joint working group that can take forward the development of training programs and workforce models that address regional and rural workforce shortages.

A National Intern Work Readiness Forum was convened to further consider the Review of Medical Intern Training Report’s recommendation relating to intern work readiness in September 2016. The Workshop was jointly sponsored by the Medical Deans Australia and New Zealand and the Health Workforce Principal Committee (HWPC).

While scholastic performance is highly important, this alone is not enough to ensure we are graduating health professionals who reflect and are responsive to the diversity within the communities they serve; in particular across three key dimensions: 1) ethnicity; 2) socioeconomic status; 3) geography / rurality of origin.