What are the odds?!

http://www.emergencyone.com.au/

The other day I asked my wife what she'd like me to write about on this blog as an aspiring medical student, she suggested I talk about the reality (and sadly the difficulty) of getting into medicine. So here goes...

So what are the chances of becoming a medical student, successfully completing the course and becoming a doctor?.....Sadly not great. When I sat in 2005, I did a quick tally of width by length and worked out there were about 400 applicants in the hall with me. With about 100 places for Flinders and assuming all states held roughly the same ratios, that gave me about a 1 in 4 chance of gaining entry. The cutoff at that time was about 62 for Flinders.

In the 2-3 years after I started medicine there was a large increase in the number of places offered as part of a variety of responses to terrible indigenous health status, major shortages of rural GPs and shortages of GPs in general. Hence the cutoff dropped as low as 54 or so (these were often rural bonded places and domestic full fee places); obviously being Flinders, an immaculate GPA could offset this score. However the number of applicants quickly increased to counteract this trend.

In the ensuing years, I'm now advised that the odds of gaining a place are now under 20%. That is to say out of an exam hall of 1000 people, 800 will walk away empty handed......Better than Master Chef but still pretty terrible. From this there will be an attrition rate anywhere as high as 10-20% prior to and during the degree. Then maybe 5% in the first 1-2 years of being a doctor. So our cohort of 1000 people is now whittled down to about 175 doctors. 

Why are the odds so bad?

Like any market place there is supply and demand:

The demand for doctors is tightly regulated by government expenditure on health care, employment places for doctors and the community's need for their services. Bear in mind there are few thoughts scarier for a new doctor than having spent 4-7 years training and roughly $100-500k and not having any means to feed your family at the end. A quick tally of the ACER website shows that there are about 1500 domestic places at Australian universities. Hence out of maybe 10,000 applicants each year 2,250 will be offered an interview and 1500 will win a golden ticket.

As for supply, why are there so many people keen to chase this dream? At the end of the day, medicine is a sexy career. The prospect of money, power, prestige, knowledge, social mobility, being your own boss, being THE boss, improving humanity and improving science all loom large on the minds of GAMSAT applicants. I'll write a post on the reality of being a doctor soon.....it's a bit depressing and I don't want to get off topic.

Ultimately, the odds of success are pretty poor. But someone's gotta do it, it might as well be you!! All the best for your preparations.

http://www.emergencyone.com.au/