A new report has found by end of June, nearly 9% of all general practitioners in Australia will be over the age of 70. It's prompted calls for incentives to encourage medical students to work as GPs rather than in hospitals. Dr Cathryn Hester is the Queensland chair of the Royal Australian College of General Practitioners and says the ageing population of GPs may inhibit their ability to meet the needs of their communities.
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00:00The population of healthcare workers, including GPs, tend to be ageing and we're concerned
00:08that this will provide a little bit of an issue in terms of meeting our community's
00:12needs in the future, especially because we know we need more GPs in the future to help
00:17serve our populations which are themselves ageing and also suffering from more chronic
00:21diseases.
00:23So we know that just over 8% of GPs are going to be over the age of 70 and we need to find
00:29ways to support this population of GPs to continue to serve their communities in the
00:34most safe and most beneficial way possible.
00:37I think we might feel the effects of the ageing population of GPs most acutely in our rural
00:43facilities.
00:45We find in our rural communities GPs often really are embedded and are so important in
00:50their communities that they continue to work, especially when there's concerns that there's
00:54not another GP coming along who might be able to help share the burden and help care for
00:58the communities as well.
01:00And look, in the last year we've actually seen an uplift in the number of junior doctors
01:03interested in training as a GP, which is really heartening.
01:07We've filled an extra 20% of places for next year, but what we will be asking the Federal
01:12Government coming into the election next year, or actually this year, 2025, is that there
01:17is extra support for growing a GP population and support for encouraging junior doctors
01:23to choose this career.