Page 3227 - Week 10 - Wednesday, 18 October 2006
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2004 and the students are part of a four-year postgraduate medical degree. The first of these home-grown ACT students will graduate in 2008.
The school currently can have an intake of up to 92 students each year. We have lobbied the Australian government to secure the current 80 commonwealth-supported places, and the Chief Minister and I have been actively working to gain an additional 10 places which we could take straight away. Unfortunately, at the moment, the Prime Minister and the minister for health are not supporting that request for 10 extra places, although we are getting support from Senator Humphries up on the hill. He is lobbying the Prime Minister and the minister for health to support those additional 10 places. The ACT government believes that we should have received additional places in the recent carve-up of places. It would have increased our capacity to train more doctors, particularly in a climate where we have a shortage of doctors nationwide, and certainly a shortage of GPs here in Canberra.
The medical appointments and training unit in ACT Health has also recently been established, I think in this year’s budget, to foster the linkage of undergraduate and postgraduate medical education and training. We received around $400,000 in recurrent funding. We have invested $3.5 million recurrent to funding specialist medical officers to support our teaching and training role with medical students.
Another area where the ACT is leading the way nationally is in interprofessional learning. One of the most effective ways to foster understanding of, and respect for, various professional roles and the value of multiprofessional teams is through interprofessional learning. This gets people working in teams with the aim of providing integrated high quality care that optimises health’s scarce human resources. Recruitment for the newly created interprofessional learning coordinators situated in ACT Health is well advanced and will be announced shortly.
Fortunately, Mr Speaker, the ACT government has successfully lobbied the Australian government to establish a number of new courses for health professionals in the ACT. The masters courses in physiotherapy, dietetics and pharmacy at the University of Canberra started in July 2004, with the first cohort of 21 physiotherapists, eight dieticians and 14 pharmacists graduating in July this year. These new courses will assist us to address the workforce shortages in these professions and will ensure that we have local access to nutrition, pharmacy and physiotherapy services.
A certificate IV course for allied health assistants across three disciplines—occupational therapy assistant, physiotherapy assistant and speech therapy assistant—commenced in February 2006 at the CIT. The development of this new workforce role in the model of care is a strategy to address increasing demand and rising expectations for health services in the territory. Allied health professionals are becoming more specialised; and this new workforce role will enable allied health professionals to more effectively utilise their expertise for more complex clinical duties. Allied health assistants will work under the supervision of a registered physiotherapist, occupational therapist or a speech pathologist.
ACT Health is currently providing financial support to five students from ACT Health enrolled in a certificate IV course at CIT. The first cohort of students will undertake industry placement during September and October 2006. The first cohort of occupational
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