If GP supervisors do not get some form of relief this budget, GP training is in big trouble.
Ever have that feeling like you’ve forgotten something very important, but you just can’t work out what that is?
If federal health minister Mark Butler isn’t feeling that way in the lead up to the 12 May federal budget, he probably should be.
One of Labor’s biggest platforms heading into the last election was fixing general practice.
While the bulk of the funding – a cool $8.3 billion – went toward introducing the Bulk Billing PIP and expanding the tripled incentive, $607 million also went to building the future GP workforce.
- $265.2 million went to adding hundreds of new places on the Australian GP Training program,
- $204.8 million went to salary incentives for GPT1 registrars to ensure they didn’t lose out financially when switching from hospital-based work to GP training,
- $43.9 million went to a paid parental and study leave fund for GP registrars,
- $44 million went to adding hundreds of new primary care rotations for prevocational doctors,
- and $48.4 million went to additional Commonwealth Supported Places for universities with a strong track record of producing GP registrars.
Unfortunately, none of that money is going toward GP supervision.
That wouldn’t be a huge problem if the GP supervisor workforce was well taken care of already.If that were the case though, I wouldn’t be writing this article.
General Practice Supervision Australia’s 2025 supervisor survey found around 57% of supervisors were feeling disengaged and 64% were exhausted.
It’s also an ageing workforce. Around 58% of supervisors have already been in the role for 10 years or more and just 21% of supervisors are aged below 45.
Younger GPs are also more likely to do part-time work, which does not always mesh with supervision responsibilities.
It’s not like it’s attractive to become a supervisor. GP supervisors – unlike their salaried, hospital-based counterparts – largely go unpaid.
The maximum supervisor support payment in a metropolitan area under the National Consistent Payments Framework is $12,000 per registrar per six-month training term. And we already know that, because it is paid to the practice directly, this money is not necessarily passed on to supervisors.
While the RACGP does offer a stipend for supervisor professional development, this only comes to about $1800 and is notoriously difficult to access.
There is categorically no funding for clinical supervision, the part of training which many supervisors will tell you is where the most mentoring and development work happens.
The current funding paradigm also only acknowledges GP registrars, and ignores the supervision work and expertise which goes into hosting medical students and prevocational doctors in general practice.
GPs who supervise often find themselves having to block off appointment slots to ensure that they have the time to support their registrars or students.
Many GPs feel that they are losing out financially by taking on the supervisor role.
And this was the state of the playing field before the federal government decided to increase the number of funded GP training places by 200 each year.
To recap: there is now more money (salary incentive payments, leave payments) and more opportunity (more training and prevocational experience places) for young doctors interested in general practice. That’s great.
But nothing has been done to make supervising those young doctors an appealing prospect.
And while it would be one thing for the government to have just increased the number of places available on the AGPT and nothing else, so far all signs point to those places being in high demand.
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This year was the largest GP and rural generalist registrar intake on record, breaking the previous record set only one year before by about 20%.
With another 200 places to be added next year, the training intake is only going to get bigger.
Uh oh.
It is not going to matter how many trainees are entering general practice if there is no one to train them.
There are already registrars who successfully applied for GP training but could not find a training practice to take them on, forcing them back into hospital work.
If the current supervisor pool does not increase alongside the registrar pool, this will start to happen at a larger scale.
There’s a simple solution: formally recognise and resource clinical supervision across general practice training, including medical student and prevocational doctor placements.
Now, I’m no numbers guy myself. I don’t know how much properly paying GP supervisors would cost over the next two, three or four years.
It might be a lot.
But what is certain is that the $8.5 billion investment in Medicare and the future of general practice will go to waste if no one is around to train the next generation of general practice.
