Hello. I’ve been asked a few times about this recently so I'm going to take a quick look at the main features in selection criteria used to assess senior medical practitioners during a recruitment process for substantive posts in the Australian public health services.
Australia has large diverse groups of overly bureaucratic and devolved public sector health services. It therefore doesn’t have standard recruitment documentation, policy or job description style adopted across the states or territories. In some States variances even occur between subsidiary local health service recruitment processes, interview formats etc.
How an inner city Melbourne service recruits psychiatrists will differ to a similar service in Sydney. However, there are important features of job descriptions which are consistent throughout the country, irrespective of geography. These will be familiar to you.
Aside from stated requirements around qualifications & training, the following criteria form the spine of a public sector health service’s expectations of what constitutes the responsibilities of a consultant medical specialist in Australia. Your CVs , cover letters etc. should at least highlight these areas:
* Clinical.
*QA and clinical governance.
*Management.
*Education.
*CPD/Professional Development
*Research
Obviously this is a generalisation and selection panels can expand them or narrow the scope when considering an applicant but assume these are the minimum requirements when preparing an application or if you are planning to send in a CV proactively to a department.
All medical specialties operate in multidisciplinary team contexts and health services will expect specialists to be able to deliver care in a culturally sensitive manner and be comfortable working in a multicultural environment, including with indigenous Australian and Torres Strait Islanders.
One tip: if selected for an interview make sure you’ve done proper research on the location where the job is located.
This is just a brief snapshot. For more information and detail about Australian job selection criteria please get in touch at alasdair@spinnermedical.com
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