Medical Board of Australia 2021 report on medical colleges pathway data

Wonderful news friends. 

The Medical Board of Australia has dropped its latest report on the medical colleges specialist pathway data for 2021. This report publishes data on the number of applications received by a medical college from specialists trained overseas, records the country where their primary qualification and specialist qualification were gained, and charts overall results, waiting times for assessment, interim outcomes and so on. 

You can read insight on 2020's report for ACEM here and here for ANZCA and here for RANZCP.

I live for this report, sadly. Not least because it gives me a topic to write about. In particular I find the data on the country of training/specialist assessment outcome fascinating. The report has its usual talking points. However, I am disappointed that it decided to stop publishing specific assessment outcomes for each medical college - the number of SIMGs found to be SC, PC or NC, specifically from RANZCP, for example. This year they just have this data for interim assessment. You can of course make an assumption that interim will tend to indicate final result but it's important to see this confirmed. As a recruiter assessing applicants from all around the world, this data is useful for advising applicants and can be helpful to hiring managers, directors of medical services and workforce teams. 

I will publish a brief blog looking at the data for each of RANZCP, ACEM, ANZCA, RANZCOG, RACS - every college has different criteria in its assessment policies. 

In summary

Naturally, the pandemic affected the number of SIMGs applying. Compared with previous years most colleges had fewer applicants but a few did see an increase. More profound I think was the level of disruption to respective assessment processes where applications took longer to be processed, interviews were delayed etc. It’s incredible to think now some colleges pre-pandemic used to insist on an in person interview in Australia. I  hope the colleges who adopted video interviews will continue to stick with them, given the time, financial and carbon costs of travelling to Australia. 

The highest numbers of applications came from the United Kingdom, India and  South Africa.

The college with the highest number of applicants was the Royal Australasian College of Physicians (RACP) who processed 165 applications compared to 149 in 2020. The Royal Australian College of General Practitioners (RACGP) had the second highest number of applications, 95 applications compared to 104 in 2020.
 

The Royal Australasian College of Dental Surgeons (RACDS) had the lowest number of applicants (1).
 

Radiologists had the most amount of incomplete first submissions (22) followed by Psychiatrists (14) and Obs & Gyn (7). 

Across all colleges, 66% of SIMGs trained in the UK and Ireland were assessed as substantially comparable. In 2020 this was 78%.