A panel at the RMA25 conference has shed light on how slow progress has been in IMG support.
At an address at the Rural Medicine Australia conference in Perth on Thursday, Rural Doctors Association of Australia leadership renewed calls for further international medical graduate support amidst widespread rural medical workforce shortages.
Overseas-trained doctors are more or less the lifeblood of rural and regional medicine, making up roughly 53% of the rural medical workforce.
International medical graduates (IMGs) also account for about 56% of all GPs in Australia.
With the recommendations from Robyn Kruk’s independent review into regulatory settings for overseas-trained doctors now in the process of implementation, the RDAA has emphasised that all doctors in Australia should be treated as Australian doctors.
“Australian doctors trained overseas … that’s the word we use,” RDAA president Dr RT Lewandowski III said.
“But we’re talking about overseas trained doctors, international medical graduates.
“At RDAA, we’ve chosen to create the group to represent them, and we call our group ‘Australian doctors trained overseas’, just as a reminder that those of us in the group are Australian doctors.
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“Oftentimes, when we talk about overseas trained doctors or international graduates, in this view… [but when you do that,] you don’t think of them as Australians.”
The Kruk report made approximately 28 recommendations. The majority of these have not yet been actioned.
“What we hope to talk about and what we can do as RDAA is [look at] where we need to put our advocacy and – for those who work to recruit those doctors – what supports do we need to be advocating for,” Dr Lewandowski said.
“Where do you see things that can be corrected to create a system that is safe and fair, both to the doctor and to patients and to the system itself.”
Dr Lewandowski, who practices in far north Queensland, is himself an Australian doctor trained overseas.
“I have had the luxury of being a locally trained doctor and I think there needs to be some review of the 10-year moratorium,” former RDAA board member Dr Marian Dover said in response to Dr Lewandowski.
“I think that it’s unfair to [overseas-trained doctors] because it’s such a challenging environment, and often they don’t have the cultural support and training to be able to work in those areas.
“The other thing is that it does make the reputation of rural and remote medicine a little bit tarnished – that it’s where we send people when they train overseas, and how it almost makes the city sound like it’s the better option.”
Rural Medicine Australia, the annual joint ACRRM-RDAA conference, was held at Crown Perth between 23 and 26 October 2025.
