The doctor shortage.

SIR: Recent events at Sydney's Royal North Shore Hospital and their repercussions demonstrate how the Coalition's Health Manpower ("Workforce") chickens have come home to roost. It was under John Howard's leadership in 1996 that Michael Wooldridge accepted patently unreliable figures from the Australian Medical Workforce Advisory Committee and reduced our medical workforce.

Lest any reader think that my comment is made with hindsight, I refer them to my article thirty years ago, in this very journal (1977, Vol. XXI, no. 4, pp. 8-9). I drew attention then to the obviously worsening shortage of doctors and have continued doing so over the ensuing decades. AMWAC ignored the evidence from the medical employment marketplace. They were swayed by rising health care costs and international comparisons and stupidly thought that cutting supply would reduce demand.

I quote from Wooldridge's apparently forgotten address to the Australian Medical Association's National Conference in May 1996:

   We have recently had, though, a
   new report from the Australian
   Medical Workforce Advisory
   Committee (AMWAC)--"Australian
   Medical Workforce
   Benchmarks". This report found
   that even if medical school
   intakes are reduced to around
   1000 per annum and overseas
   doctor entrants from all sources
   are kept at 200 per annum we
   will still have a general oversupply
   of doctors in this country
   beyond the year 2015.

      And that estimate even
   factors in a reduction in the
   number of average hours
   worked by doctors each week.

      These findings clearly
   substantiate the view that there
   is major oversupply of medical
   workforce now and that it is not
   to be quickly remedied.

      This has clear implications
   for the costs of health care--particularly
   in terms of continued
   growth in demands for MBS-subsidised
   services.

NZ health economist Michael Cooper has claimed the Grand Old Duke of York as the patron saint of medical workforce planners. Anyone who remembers the ditty will understand why. Let the responsibility for today's disastrous consequences on the standards of medical care lie with those who made these fundamentally erroneous decisions--AMWAC and Howard. Peter Arnold, (Chairman, AMA Federal Council and National Conference, 1995-1999), Edgecliff NSW.