The Prime Minister Julia Gillard and the Minister for Health Nicola Roxon today announced funding for the clinical training of up to 12,000 more medical, nursing and allied health professional students to help deliver better health care to Australians.
22 health and medical professions will benefit in remote, regional and metropolitan Australia including doctors, nurses, midwives, physiotherapists, dieticians, dentists and Aboriginal Health Workers.
The Prime Minister said the funding will provide much-needed training places for undergraduates in those professions in highest demand.
The funds will support the undergraduate clinical training requirements for a 9.1% increase in the number of health professional students over the next three years.
This amounts to 1.2 million additional training days annually - an increase of 23.4% compared to the 2009 baseline - in 448 projects across 41 universities and over 700 clinical training providers.
The training will occur across a variety of locations and professional settings as follows:
* 60% of the providers will be the non government and private sector;
* 41% of placement days will be in priority settings as such as aged care, dental, mental health, primary heath care and community based services; and
* 37% of the additional days will be in rural and remote areas.
Minister for Health Nicola Roxon said places had been allocated by Health Workforce Australia (HWA), the new national body established by this Government to address health workforce shortages in a strategic way.
HWA have conducted the first ever nationwide workforce planning process to establish where these grants are most needed
In its future work HWA will undertake a comprehensive set of profession and specialty specific training plans for graduating nurses and medical officers. It is also working on the issue of clinical placements for overseas students.
Ms Roxon said $425 million had been allocated for the new training places over the next three years, of which $139 million would be delivered in 2011.
These funds are the direct result of the $1.6 billion COAG National Workforce Partnership, of which the Commonwealth is investing $1.1 billion - the largest investment in the health workforce ever made by an Australian Government.
Over $280 million of the National Partnership has already been allocated, including to new training and education capital projects and rural clinical schools.
The Government has already taken action to address the national shortage of health professionals by training 1,000 extra nurses every year and an additional 5,500 GPs and 680 specialist doctors over the next decade.
Training more health professionals means Australians will have better access to health and medical services into the future.
The details of training placement providers will be available at www.hwa.gov.au.