Basic physician training information session

So, welcome everyone both in person and virtually to this Queensland basic physician training network information night on basic physician training. Before we get any further, I'd just like to acknowledge the traditional owners of the land on which we're meeting here today, is the Jagera and Turrbal peoples and also extend that to any of the traditional owners on the lands on which people around the state and actually I think around the country are indeed, meeting tonight. I'd like to pay acknowledgement to anyone in the room who is of Aboriginal Torres Strait Islander descent and also pay my respects to Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Elders, past, present and emerging.

My name's Paul Jauncey, I'm one of the medical directors of the Queensland basic physician and training network and I've got Brian Wood with me, who's also one of the medical directors, Spencer Toombes is another one of the, medical directors, and Vicki Pike, who is the manager of Queensland Medical specialty training.
We've got Cathlin and Michelle from the team as well, and a number of rotation coordinators and members from the rotations that you'll be meeting throughout tonight. So, we’ve got a bit of a mission tonight to try and get through a lot of things covering basic physician training. Firstly, I just want to cover a few housekeeping things., We are recording the session tonight and that's basically for those people who might be working night shift or unable to attend for some other reason so they can look at this and for yourselves as well if you want to go back and watch an hour and a half of information, you're more than welcome to do at a later stage. If anyone has any problems with that, please let us know, otherwise we'll assume the fact that everyone's staying in the room and staying online that you're happy for the session to be recorded. We will have a section for questions at the end, but the people online if you want to send questions through as the evening's going, we will be keeping a track of those and try and deal with that at the end.  If you need to go to the bathrooms, they are out on the other side of the foyer, if for some reason everything catches on fire, go out through the fire exits and out to the lawn. If you're at home, hopefully you know how to get out of your house if it’s on fire, I  can't help you too much there.
So my job is to try and get through in about 15 to 20 minutes pretty much how to apply for basic physician training and going from the stage of thinking you might want to be a basic physician trainee to where you actually get selected into the network.
I'm going to shape this for people who are applying for basic physician training to start in 2025. I know there's a few interns in the room that might be looking at 2026 or others who might be looking at other dates. Things do change a little bit from year to year, but hopefully a lot of this will be generalisable to all of you.  So, what I'm going to do is just give a little bit of an idea of how basic physician training works in Queensland and find out a little bit about the different training rotations and that's what we're going to go into a lot of depth tonight here about Northside, Southside, Far North, North Queensland and Coastal. I'm going to go through the application and selection process and at the end there's going to be a bit of a chance for you to not only to ask questions of us,  but also have a bit of a meet and greet with both the rotation coordinators and a few of the trainees from the rotations to find out a bit more about what might be involved and hopefully help you make the right decision when it comes RMO campaign time.
So I think the first thing to obviously consider is do you want to be a physician and you'll hear us talking about the planning for physician training discussion. But certainly, when I'm a DPE, sitting down with people, thinking about basic physician training, I go through with them to think really what their goals are, and is physician training the thing for them. And I think it's a really important, although we're focusing on basic physician training tonight, it's very important to also think about what sort of position you want to be at in the long run and that's not just what specialty, but where you want to work. Do you want to be, outpatient, inpatient, private, public and those are fairly important things to be considering even at the beginning and your journey might take you on a completely different path. You might end up somewhere you never would have thought of. I probably say that's true with my journey through physician training, but it's always good to look at that long term goal. What sort of physician do you want to be and keep that in mind that basic physician training is really a stepping stone towards being the physician you want to be in the long term.
So if you think physician training's for you, one of the first things to consider is, are you eligible and basically the key things of eligibility., One is you have to hold general registration, that's a requirement for the college. Now I understand there's a few people from overseas who might be doing their provisional year and, the way we approach this, is you need to be eligible in February 2025 when you sign up for physician training, that's kind of the college rules, you've got to meet the college eligibility criteria for RACP basic physician training, which pretty much is not too much more. In addition to that, and in Queensland we look at PGY3 entry into physician training. There is always a few little curveballs, depending on when people started physician training, people taking time off, if you got any idiosyncrasies, then always can contact us directly for advice. But a blanket rule, PGY3 SHO year or beyond and those are the key eligibility criteria to go through this process.
Now based on that, when we look at basic physician training, we're sort of assuming you've got two years of pre vocational training under your belt, your intern and JHO year and then what you're signing up to is 3 years of training and that’s a minimum of three years of full time training. One thing that I think is quite useful, is to expect that you're going to move between different settings, and we'll talk a little bit more about what that might look like later on and probably realistically signing up for basic physician training, you are probably signing up for about 25% of nights /relieving terms. That might sound like a lot, but if you doing DEM you’re probably doing 60% more than poor emergency medicine guys who seem to be doing nights all the time, but I think it's important part that's going to be part of the basic physician training.

So, part of it is doing your time based training, another really important part is doing workplace based assessments and that's a key thing with basic physician training is you actually get and that's the training aspect. You get assessed on the job, doing things you might have heard words like LNAs, mini CX, PQRs being thrown about and that's an important part of actually growing as a clinician and improving your clinical skills. Because as I said, the goal is to be a physician at the end. You want to really refine your skills at the coal face and then of course, there's the big written and clinical exams which are quite scary but certainly achievable.
Advanced training thereafter, we're not going to talk too much about that tonight, cause it really is a separate application process for that, but it's another three years minimum and you've got to apply directly to the subspecialty Advanced training programme. That's a bit different depending on what subspecialty you're looking at. But again, workplace-based assessments are there and instead of the exams, you get a research project which is not a big scary thing you've got to overcome.
Now in physician training, there's a number of different players that are really helping you try and achieve your goals to be a good sort of generally grounded BPT, who's ready to go into specialty training and advanced training. So, there's the college that sets the standards of physician training. They provide resources through the Learning series. They provide support to you directly as a trainee in a number of different forms and then there's the DPE, who is sort of like the college representative inside a training institution, although they’re employed by the hospital that they work for, they’re sort of representing the College in a training institution and overseeing basic training for the College in that particular institution.
However, this is a vocational training programme. It’s not a university, so you’ve got to be working whilst you're getting these skills. So, there's the employing hospital who obviously gives you a job and pays you money. They're also the ones who provides you with your supervisors. They provide you with all the learning opportunities, they've got the patients who allow you to learn based on their cases and seeing them and so the role of the network is to try and sort of be a bridge between all the employing hospitals to try and coordinate delivery of physician training across Queensland. So, the network isn't the same as the college we all wear college hats. We work really closely with the college, and that's why Hannah and Tracey are here tonight, but we're a Queensland Health body trying to help Queensland Health come together, deliver physician training in a way that meets the needs of all the stakeholders in physician training. And what comes out of that is we develop a 3 year training programme, which is really the sort of experience that you get and it might be in one hospital for one year, another hospital for another year or another hospital for a year after that, and because you're moving through different settings, the network helps bring these settings together to coordinate your training and try and set you up with a training programme for three years, if we didn't have that you would basically be applying to hospitals every year as your RMO contract expires and trying to get all your jobs together and  be trying to hope that everything sort of falls into place.
So in order to apply to commence training, first thing I'd suggest is go to the network web page and just have a read through the how to apply documents, the network web page is really useful throughout all of that. If you forget everything else, I say just remember that there is a network web page and if you have any questions a good idea to go there and have a look around.  The College Basic Training Handbook is also a useful reference as well, but the network web page is very valuable.
The things you need to consider is which network rotation you're thinking of applying to, and that's kind of something we're trying to help you out with tonight is to find out about the training opportunities and the different rotations and then one of the things we require is for you to have a chat with the DPE or an educational supervisor and complete a planning physician training form, now this is not an assessment they're not judging you, it's just a chance to talk about physician training, kind of let you know what you getting into before you sign up and also have a bit of a chance to sort of talk about what could be involved and what their views of Physician training are, basically so when you start next year, you've got a good idea of what's happening.
Now the network rotations which you are going to hear about tonight, there’s five major rotations and I won’t go into too much detail because we're going to hear a lot about them. But as you can see, there's a lot of variety. Some have only one hospital and one secondment site, some are all drive aways, some cover more than half the state and there's pros and cons. But you want to think about which rotation gives you the opportunities that you want and the things that I encourage you to think about tonight is when you're listening to these presentations are both training factors and lifestyle factors. So different rotations may have different access to different terms. Certain rotations have fly away destinations certainly are all within driving distance and that's something to choose and if you do sign up to a rotation, if it's got fly away rotations, flyway placements expect that you may have to do those flyway placements by choosing that rotation, you're sort of saying oh, I expect that I might have to do flyway rotations. You can find out a bit about the work environment and we'll talk about that tonight, and different subspecialty terms and subspecialty exposures that might be there. Also, the size of the hospitals and there's a bit of variety in that. There's lifestyle factors think where do you want to live and how you’re going to plan out your three-year training, where can your partner get a job? Where do you want to get a job in five years’ time? And that's probably why the important reasons you get diversity of exposure in physician training is to try and have an opportunity to see a number of different hospitals meet a number of different people. You never know that six-month placement you did in a small hospital might be your chance to meet someone who eventually gets you a boss job in five years’ time.
Also think what you want to do outside of medicine. You want to go snorkelling? Do you want to go hiking or whatever options are there?
The other question that often comes up, and it's something to consider, is when you apply for network, you do choose whether you're applying for an SHO position or a registrar position, and the reason for that is there's a lot of different approaches as to how people come to physician training rough rule of thumb most PGY3’s feel comfortable at SHO level PGY4 and above probably get a bit bored being an SHO so might want to be a registrar, but this is something you talk about in that planning physician training discussion with an educational supervisor. The way I tend to council people is if you really like feeling confident in a job then probably the SHO might be better if especially if you're a bit junior and you haven't had that many medical terms. However, if you are one of those people who just likes diving in the deep end, and if you're not feeling a little bit out of your depth, you tend to just cruise and maybe jumping in as a registrar, might be better, think about how comfortable you are doing met calls and some of these other critical care things that come up with the registrar and there's a few facilities, for instance the Royal Brisbane only has SHOs for BPT1, so that might come into your decision as well. And obviously a registrar gets paid about 20 grand more or thereabouts. So that's something to consider as well, it's a substantial promotion. But yeah, have a chat to your educational supervisor. Have a chat to your registrar, have a chat to your boss who you're working with and get their feeling and also bear in mind where you are now trying to extrapolate where you're going to be in six months’ time when you actually do start training.
So how to actually apply is through the RMO campaign and basically just need to select that? Yes, you want to apply to the Queensland basic physician training network. That's probably the most important thing and then it will ask you a whole heap of specific questions for the network, but make sure you apply to that. Don't tick medical Registrar at random Hospital, make sure you're applying to the network as your first choice, that will get you into the network pipeline. And then what do we look for in terms of suitability for selection and these are available on our website, but these are the criteria we’re looking for and really there’s nothing surprising there. You’re learning you’re a public servant cause you’re working for Queensland Health mostly, there’s a couple of private hospitals, but obviously they’re working for Queensland Health as well, but literally you’re a public servant otherwise.
You work as a team member. You work as a professional. You’ve got to make decisions. You got to work after hours. These are all things that medical, SHOs and registrars have to do and they’re the criteria by which all of the selection processes is based.
What happens is you go through the network selection process, and you accumulate scores based on a number of things. The interview, which we'll talk about is 60%, so it's a large portion of the score there's short statements, so these are questions that will be asked of you in the RMO campaign. Please remember that they are being scored, we're not scoring you based on your English skills, but just actually outline what sort of leadership and other things you've done.
Your time spent in regional centres is 10% of the score time spent in medical terms beyond intern year is 5% of the score and then your referee reports are 5% of the score and those referee reports are just a standard Queensland Health ones that you get from nominating referees through the RMO campaign.
With the interviews, their virtual and their multiple mini station format, they probably budget about 2 hours for them and basically what you do is you sit down, you log into Zoom and then we move you from station to station to station. You just stay there on screen and get asked the questions and each station covers a specific domain. It might be professional it might be clinical and basically, it's all stuff that you experience day-to-day in a role as a medical SHO or registrar. So, there's nothing too exotic and we're not expecting you to know all the subtle nuances and being super sub specialists, we want you to be safe person who can actually work out what to do for this patient and basically this is probably the main pass-fail section of the selection process as well and it is possible to fail the interview. Not too many people this happens to, but some people just aren't quite suitable and at that stage when people aren't suitable, normally they get through the next year. It's probably just a little bit junior, but for those who aren't successful there is an opportunity for feedback to assist people with the plan of reapplying next year.
The interview also helps determine the Reg versus SHO level too because registrars will be able to answer the questions in a little bit more depth and be a little bit more sophisticated with their thinking.
Now these interview dates are available on the website if you need them, and basically if you apply to a rotation, you'll be scheduled into one of these interview Windows. If there is some reason where you really can't make the interview date associated with your rotation, let us know and sometimes we can schedule other interviews, but we try and keep everyone together in the one interview section.
Now, once you've done the interview, when we put everything together, basically we come up with a selection outcome. So, there are some people down the bottom who don't quite meet the standard at interview, and so they're not suitable. We let them know straight away so they can re preference to find other jobs in the RMO campaign.  Then basically we try and work out how many people can we offer jobs on the network. Say there's 60 people and 65 people are, say, going for a job? Sorry, 70 people going for a job and there's 60 positions.
What will happen is, we offer 60 of those people the top 60 people. Based on that ranking system, a position either at a reg or SHO within a rotation, and then they have a chance to accept or decline.
Those people who are sort of 61 through 70, they might be offered a position in a different rotation. You don't have to interview again. So, say if the Southside's full, but the Northside's got space, we will offer you a position in the Northside rotation.
If everyone's oversubscribed, some people might be suitable and waitlisted, and then if a position comes up, then we'd offer them a position down the track. I'm going to be honest, historically there haven't been too many people who aren't getting preferences in their own rotation, but we never know what happens until we actually run the campaign and see where people preference.
Some general tips for the selection process. One of the things I'd say that's really useful based on all those scoring project parameters is working as a PHO in regional Queensland. The reason being you get points for clinical experience. You get points for working in regional Queensland. You'll be familiar with all the situations that come up in the interview questions and also when you're answering questions about leadership and quality improvement, you get a fairly good opportunity for that. However, everyone's already in their jobs at the moment, so it's a bit tricky to change that now. I think the other thing I'd advise is just get exposure to the sort of things you see your BPT registrars doing, MET calls, admissions, family meetings, multidisciplinary meetings, try and take on a bit more responsibility. Not only will that help you with the interviews, but it's also good. It will help you for your BPT.
I think when you're answering questions, just try and focus it to the patient in the scenario and try and avoid two generic answers. Just think what's really going on with the patient and really read the questions. Like for instance, if it says use the language you would use with the patient, don't come out and use jargon.
And so don't talk about, you know, like intestinal line transporters.  If you're trying to counsel someone on iron deficiency anaemia, just use the words you use of you are talking to the patient.
Based on this, you'll get allocated to a training programme and the way the training programmes are allocated, we will offer a number of training programmes to people within a rotation and the shape of those training programmes is your first year will be in one facility at either an SHO or registrar level and thereafter all setting placements will be a minimum of six months duration. So, there might be programmes which are one year and one hospital year in another hospital and a year and another hospital. One might be eighteen months in one hospital, then a year in a different hospital and six months.
Look at that first hospital. There's a large variety of different training programmes. You will be given a menu in general, if you're in a rotation that has fly aways, I think it's always good to anticipate that you'll be doing a flyway rotation. Not all training programmes have fly away rotations, but I think if you're signing up to a rotation that has flyway rotations, please be prepared for that and should you need it, there's normally an additional 4th year if you defer your exam or have an unsuccessful exam, or for some reason you decide to take four years for your training. We do offer another year and that sort of gets made-up when you're when you're at the end, because obviously it depends on what your needs are then.
And these training programmes are allocated based on your merit ranking based on your overall score from the selection process. So, if you score top in the selection process, you'll get the first preference. I should say Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander candidates who are suitable, go to the very top of our ranking list, and they get the first preference overall.
And so general things to consider when you're looking at your training programmes. Think where do I want to do BPT1? Where do I want to sit the exam? What sort of level 1, level 2 hospitals do I want some experience in, Northside and Southside You can move at different Level 3 as you might want to do some time at the Mater some time at PAH and think about which of these you're going to prioritise. Cause basically you going to choose about 10 different training programmes based on what you're interested in.
Quick note, if anyone has already started BPT, so you not needing a full three years of training, just make sure you speak to the network rotation coordinator, the person you're going to meet tonight from the rotation you're interested in, because obviously you don't need a three-year training plan. You have got a two- or one-year training plan and you're going be sitting your exam at a different time to what we anticipate for that. So just make sure you speak to the NRC.
There were a lot of pre-questions about recognition of prior learning submitted on the e-mail, really briefly their rules. This is looked after by the college, not looked after by the network, and it's something you apply once you've joined RACP training as a general, as a pretty solid rule, it's only going to be 12 months of RPL and needs to be within five years, and it's basically going to be comparable to RACP training. Classic example, often applications from UK grads have done some internal medicine training will get approved if you're in an unaccredited position i.e. locum position non training PHO position, you're unlikely to get RPL if you've got further questions feel free to reach out to us and we can provide a bit of advice, but it is a college monitored process and you need to get selected and start training first.
So I’ve gone a little bit overtime, so apologies to everyone else and but I think my one key tip is just review the network web page which has a selection criteria. It's got the how to apply guide and when you do sit down to do the RMO campaign sit down and have that how to apply guide open next to you because it will take you step by step of what you need to select and what you need to put in and so I think that's the end of my section, if there are any questions, feel free to pop them online and keep your questions otherwise in the room for the end when we come back and now it's time to hear from the Far North training network and we've got Simon and Julian to come and chat with us.
Thanks everyone, I’m Julian Harris, I'm a second year infectious diseases Advanced Trainee, currently working at the Royal Brisbane but I had the privilege of working in Cairns for seven years, including all of my BPT training, and I'm joined by Simon Smith, maybe I'll let you introduce yourself, Simon OK..
So Cairns is a large regional centre, with a population of about 160,000 people, it's a very diverse sort of culturally and ethnically, with 10% of the population being First Nations people and a lot of seasonal workers, tourists and backpackers that come for the beautiful reef and rainforest, as well as professionals that come to work in the hospital and government public services. So really picturesque place because maybe you can see from these photos it's nestled between forest and mountain ranges and the ocean on the flat strip of land.
The hospital itself is fairly modern, it's a 530 bed tertiary hospital, it's currently undergoing expansion, including the Cairns University Hospital redevelopment.
It's centrally located, close to town, walking distance to the Esplanade, to restaurants, bars as well as housing nearby. There's a large parking centre, bike storage, showers, accommodations easy to find, maybe less so recently.
A major drawcard, I think having worked at Prince Charles last year and the Royal Brisbane this year is electronic medical records, which I miss greatly. There's a 24-hour library and a doctor's lounge with showers, lockers, bedrooms and computers.
I think one of the main draw cards that you might hear from people who work there is about the hospital culture and forgive my gratuitous selfies here with the clinical director and some colleagues and AMS pharmacist in the top there. So, it's a large hospital, but it's got a sort of small town feel, and generally people are friendly, approachable. It's a really collegial environment and I think in general, there's a rejection of this notion of medical hierarchy that you might see in other larger centres. Generally you get your half days, overtime is paid, and there's a really active social scene because a lot of people that work there aren't from there, it's end of term drinks, a lot of the times on Fridays they'll be inter departmental F block, which is the pub next to the hospital.
Topical Fridays, which you can see in the middle of picture there, annual junior Doctor lunch event which can get pretty wild and a lot of sports as well and I'll let Simon take over here.

Thanks Julian, yes I am Simon Smith I am an ID and a general medicine physician up in Cairns and I've been there on this occasion for about 10 years and I was a BPT and advanced training there for a few years as well.
Now the closest capital city to Cairns is Port Moresby, we're a long way away from Brisbane and although Townsville might seem quite close, it's still 4 hours away. So, because of that, we tend to try and be as self-sufficient as possible, and we try and do as much as we can on our own. The good news is, if you are daunted by that is there's an International Airport, flights to Japan if you fancy skiing, it's only about 7 hours away with Jetstar and there's some pretty good deals. There are flights to Bali as well and they're used to be flights to Guam and Hong Kong and the Philippines,
but just with tourism and things, it's settled down and they've stopped, but hopefully there's plans to start those up again at some point in the future.
Cairns, traditionally a lot of the people that work there aren't from Cairns, so at least that you know people aren't hanging out with their old school friends. People are actually quite open to meet people and welcoming and introduce themselves.
But because we're quite remote and quite isolated, we cover a large area. So, although our health service district is the Cairns area, which is on the left here, we also cover the Cape and Torres region. So it's about 380,000 square kilometres, which is about the size of the state of Victoria, so when you're on call or even if you're just covering and working in cardiology or haematology, you'll get calls from the border of PNG, sometimes even from people who are working in PNG just for a bit of advice and you'll cover and be expected to field calls and things can get pretty unique and you know when you give your plan in perhaps one of the big tertiary centres in the South East corner if you are working in a remote island, you might say, I would recommend these antibiotics and they might say just check the coverage. We've got this, this, this and this, what can we use? And that's the same with a lot of them, a lot of specialties.  We cover all medical specialties the things that we don't have are cardiothoracic and neurosurgery.  But when you do work in the specialties, most of the consultants, there's not a big private medicine hospital or anything like that in Cairns and so most of the consultants work full time publicly, so if you need to get hold of a consultant, we're usually sitting in our office alright and so if you come across challenges with people saying oh sorry I'm not this private hospital today or I'm in my private rooms, I'll see them tomorrow. That really doesn't happen. There's always someone around and available, so you should hopefully feel quite supported.
But the most unique thing about Cairns is apart from, you know, the beautiful scenery that Julian's already said, is that you do see some quite unique medicine. So unfortunately, partly because of socio economic disadvantage and remoteness we do see quite extreme sort of medicine. Most of the patients get admitted under general medicine, so it's a push model, not pull model and so the specialties aren't cherry picking, you know I'll take that clean cut case that's interesting the General Medicine physicians will look after the most and then we'll decide if they think the person is best managed somewhere else.
With cardiology, there's lots of rheumatic heart disease. You know people coming in with big ischemic events, you know, 30 and 40.  There's TB, advanced Bronchiectasis, obviously when you do ID we see lots of Tropical Medicine, lots of lector melioidosis, and then with things like endocrine and gastroenterology and Renal, there's just lots and lots of pathology.
But what you tend to do is because people might be living, you know several 100 kilometres away from, even as a smallish hospital like Cairns, you start becoming a bit more pragmatic and start to really develop your patient focused care.
And when you come to Cairns, what we offer is - there's one rotation, that might be in Atherton or Innisfail, and that's about an hour's drive from Cairns. Not everyone will get the opportunity to do that, if you really want to do it, you can, but most people don't actually get to do that, and so all of your training would be in Cairns Hospital for the three years. We guarantee that all BPTs will get subspecialty.
Rotations one acute and general medicine and then one relief, and then your relief term you're likely to get two sets of nights, ok and then it's backfill for the rest of the time. But we guarantee that you'll get two subspecialty rotations.   Now when you’re in your first year BPT, you might get one of, you might get your top five choice, but certainly in your second and third year, you should get your first choice.
We don't normally talk about exam pass rates, we can be very open, you know for many, many years we were probably the highest or the second highest in the states. We dropped down for a couple of years and then this year we're back up in 90% for our clinical exam, which I think is close to the highest in the state, if not the country. So, like I said, we don't dwell too much on that, but we're confident that you will, you know we do that now. The reasons for that and you might say well, why is that the case? and people have asked us openly “why are your exam rates you know maybe higher than what people might anticipate”. I used to think it was because the excellent teaching and the supportive environment that we have. But I think that generally the reason is, that when you come to work in Cairns, I think and I hope you generally have a good time and so if you're having a good time at work and you actually, you know, having fun and you find it stimulating and interesting when you go home to study, you don't resent the fact that you've just spent eight or nine hours getting flogged and having a hard time from your bosses. Alright if everyone's having a good time, you would like, oh I might just read off about, you know, hepatitis B or you know lupus flare that I saw today is kind of interesting and so when you come to your exam, you don't you even have to study too much because you've been studying for the last three years. Alright, I think Julian's got some more pictures, so this is of me, I think he mentioned that I’ll let Julian finish just with some more.

I only get to do the fun parts. I think the other thing to say is if you get a chance to visit before you come up, I'd recommend it. But there's despite the small size, there's a lot to do. There are the bars, restaurants, heaps of music, there's the tanks which are Old World War Two storage tanks. That's a great music venue. There's a performing arts centre that's recently been built, that's got a lot of theatre and music there. So the Cairns indigenous art festivals, kayak is awesome and Laura Quinkan dance festival even if you don't come and train in Cairns is a great thing to do and I think the biggest drawcard for me is what you can do on your weekends.
There's incredible pristine rainforest, islands, the reef, so if you like the outdoors, there's plenty to do.
So I think, in summary, Why Cairns? It is a supportive and friendly environment, good access to specialty terms. Historically we've had a great pass rate as you have heard, there's a unique demographic and access to Tropical Medicine and a great lifestyle.
That's us.
So after all those tropical pictures I get to talk about numbers and things like that, I’ll introduce myself I’m Professor Brian Wood, one of the medical directors.
We get a lot of questions about flexible work arrangements and I will 100% say that the network and the College, two distinct entities, support flexible work arrangements. This has changed hugely over the last eight years. I've been in Queensland for eight years and this is 100% now something that can happen.
There are lots of different ways of doing flexible work arrangements part time positions, typically more than 0.2 and less than 1FTE and there are lots of variables as to how to do that, job share arrangements where two people share one job, periods of extended leave and we are supportive within reason of all of these possibilities as to how to do that and I think  by far the majority of our constituent hospitals are also very supportive. When you get down to individual departments, I always say on this that if you offer a director, would you like half a trainee, oh, no, no, no, no, well would you like half a trainee or 0 trainees? Oh, we’ll have a half and suddenly you can manage with half. So, there are ways to make this happen. I think my message on this, if this is something that you are interested in, tell us, and be upfront about that. Make that clear that this is something, we can't do anything about it if we don't know about it, so very much if flexible work is something that you're looking at doing and this may change. We realise life happens and this may change. You may start full time, go part time and vice versa and do that and we'll try and do that.
So we collect those preferences as part of the preference survey after selection is finalised, so we by definition, therefore we can't prejudice against you being part time, that would be against HR law for starters, but more importantly, we don't actually know at that stage and it's done afterwards.
It may, for obvious reasons, affect some of the where to go, because we know there are some places will be able to do this better than others, but every single one of our five rotations you're going to hear about today selling their wares with nice tropical pictures and other things are available will explain what they can do, but every single one of our rotations can offer flexible working and we work with all of that as we know what's happening with that. And again, as Paul's talk about, this is something to speak to the NRC about speak to the DPE of the hospital you're going, the more information that people have, the more that they can help you to make this better.  Then if it doesn't work at first, speak to us. There are ways of doing this with direct links with trainees, but equally we can help and there's trainee forums to try and do this, to look at job share partners, to do things in different ways. But again, speak to us and we will help you wherever we can. It's not perfect, but it's so much better than it was and something that can mostly be done. I think things to think about that is how long do I want to work part time or job share. Now there are so many reasons why people may want to work part time, from burnout, to I've just had a baby or my partner's just had a baby, or I wish to train for the Olympic triple jump, I've had that, so there are lots of ways as to why people may want to work part time.
Will this effect where I'm prepared to work. What's the best work pattern to suit me?
You still need to do some level of nights and we know that there are challenges with childcare and various other things, but somethings will be done if you are in job share arrangement. Particularly how are you going to do safe handover. There are still patients that need looked after that are the most important thing we need to do. How are we going to overcome difficulties if your job sharing?
If things are going on, and again we can help with that.
And some college processes are time based pro rata.
So in simple terms, if you're working point 0.5FTE, then you need to be doing two years to meet the one year that you may need for some of the aspects of the college training.
We will look at deferral of commencement. So, if you're about to have a baby or for whatever other reason as described, we can look at appropriate deferral of commencement up to a period of six months and if there are special circumstances.
I'm just picking on Cairns because we've heard about them already. You've gone up to Cairns cause you wanted to go swimming with fishes, but now your partner's got a job in Gold Coast, and you really need to go there. We can look at that for how things are going to happen and do things in different ways. So, there are processes again, all on the website as to how we may wish to do this and help you with that and things like interruptions for training and various other things. We would much rather keep you working on the network to become eventually a consultant looking after the people of Queensland, that is our goal and if there are ways that we can help do that, yes, there are challenges of flexibility and both in college level and in network and hospital level. But we will do what we can to try and help.

Something else that we've had, questions about already and we're happy to talk more about is there is an opportunity for mid-year entry into training.
There is a detailed document about how to do that that on the website. Typical eligibility for that might be an overseas graduate who's just recently gained general registration, somebody coming from interstate who missed the network application process because they've returned from parental leave. These are real examples that things that we've done, somebody who's chosen to move from another specialty into medicine, not just GP’s. There's lots of other specialties that see the light and another type of medical officer for any valid reason extended leave for whatever reason. So, if you think you might fit into one of these categories either get in touch, we will answer the questions normally and Cathlin and Michelle our wonderful admin team do just that, Yes, absolutely, there we go and it all happens in the back office as to what we need to do and whilst we're doing that, we can help you with that and explain that. But there are options as to how to do that and we can talk more about that.
Eligibility, most of it is the same as for the main eligibility period, but obviously some different dates you need General Rego, to be able to register with the RACP as a basic physician trainee by end of August, need to be PGY3, you need a current employment contract in a Queensland network hospital until the end of the current medical year in a position suitable for basic physician training. So, for this to work you need to be in the job, then to be able to basically get that accredited post hoc so there are some inclusion and exclusion criteria, but it is possible.

You submit your application for the network in June through the RMO campaign. Indicate that you want to be considered for mid-year entry, discuss your plans, cause again, it's a bit like as Paul has described, discuss your plans for training with the relevant network rotation coordinator. You're going to meet all of those with a couple of standings tonight and your local DPE, but the information about the NRC will be made clear and they've got to be able to accommodate your ongoing training and exam needs, but most of the time we can. And then pass the network selection process, so, it's not a way of getting out of the selection process, you’ve still got to pass that, to do that, but then it buys you six months, which can be important, and I appreciate everybody's got different circumstances. The one best bit of advice I was ever given when I was a medical student from a doer Scottish physician, remember, laddie, you are a senior doctor a lot longer than you are a junior doctor, enjoy the ride. So, think about that as we're going, but that's it there, it's possible, and there's ways to do that. So that's all I'm going to say just now. We're happy to answer questions on that and in our networking session, I'm now going to pass on to Faseeha, who's our acting Southside network rotation coordinator. We are encouraging flexibility by our regular NRC being on parental leave at the moment and we also have Aarya one of the advanced trainees from PA who I met in a lift today with a strange Irishman, and then we will hear from Spencer, but first they're going to talk through Southside and sell their wares.

Thanks, Brian, hello everyone my name's Faseeha, as Brian mentioned I'm the acting Southside coordinator and my other job is that of an endocrinologist and we have Aarya today who will talk to you towards the end of my presentation about her experience on the Southside and I think I should just say that I myself am Southside trained and I thoroughly loved my basic physician training on the Southside.
Alright, so the Southside network is actually quite a vast network. It's actually probably one of the bigger networks in the QLD physician network programme. We have nine hospitals in total. We have 3 tertiary centres, so the PAH, Greenslopes and Mater hospital and we have four level 2 hospitals, Logan, Toowoomba, QEII and Ipswich and we have two regional or fly away facilities Harvey Bay and Bundaberg.
I guess in terms of the Southside network, we actually have quite a unique training experience and we have a mixture with the only network that has a mixture of both public and private hospital rotations and I guess when you become a consultant in the future is actually quite difficult to get a full time public job and often you'll get some fractionated public and then end up in the private. So I think it's a good sort of way to get some exposure to private work and actually learn from consultants who are doing  it quite well.
If you work at places like the Mater, there are certainly perks there with like tax savings, and they have their entertainment card and have access to the fringe benefit taxes and I guess our hospitals are sort of located or scattered all throughout Queensland, but in particular you can also be near the beach. So, we've got Bundaberg and Harvey Bay. All our trainees are expected to get at least 12 months at a tertiary hospital and some of you get 18 months and usually you get the tertiary time in the lead up or during the preparation for your written and clinical exam.
We will have lots of lines because we have nine hospitals, we have about 60 different options that you can choose from if you apply to the Southside network and I guess it really depends whether you want to be an SHO or registrar but we also need to sort of balance it with the workforce.
In general, if you choose a fly away rotation, we try and give you more time at a tertiary centre, so you're likely to get sort of 12 months, 18 months.
So our examination preparation programme is actually very good, and so it's quite comprehensive. We have a mixture. You'll have access to didactic lectures, bedside clinical teaching, private and public long cases, all our trainees on the Southside network will have access to two or three clinical trial exams and we usually encourage them to go to an external hospital just to mimic what happens on the real day.
You'll also be able to access teaching resources from the tertiary centres across all network sites and our chief medical registrar, Adrian, at the PAH has actually made these amazing weekly MCQ quizzes in the lead up to the written exam that you'll be able to get access to.  You'll have an exposure to a wide range of sub specialities. So, if you were at the Mater, for example, and you wanted to come to the PAH to do a renal transplant lung will be very happy to facilitate that and you know we have at least four hospitals that offer inpatient dialysis. We've got renal and liver transplant at the PAH we have very niche basic physician training terms. If you want something like vascular medicine, we offer that at the PAH, there's at least six hospitals that offer BPT time in endocrinology, as well as infectious disease and respiratory, we offer that at a number of hospitals and I guess you know, working myself at the Southside is a basic trainee I thought it was a real privilege to work with really smart consultants. Some of them are pioneers in their field, both in Australia and internationally and a lot of them actually write up international guidelines and you really are learning from the best. In terms of, sorry, I want to go back, but we actually have really good pass rate on the Southside so this year our written was actually higher than the state average and we actually had 100% clinical pass rate at the PAH last year for the written and we are hoping we can continue that. In terms of research opportunities, we've got two big research institutions on the Southside. So, TRI at the PAH and the Mater Research Institute. So you'll be able to access that, but certainly at all the hospitals on the Southside, there will be plenty research opportunities that you can partake in.
As Brian mentioned, we are very committed to supporting flexible training and we currently have trainees in flexible work arrangements at Logan, Ipswich, QEII and Greenslopes and we're hoping to expand this to every site on the Southside network.
I'll hand over to Aarya, I just have to add a caveat that Aarya is a two year network trainee, but now we've obviously moved to a three year programme. Thank you.

Good evening, everyone. My name's Aarya Murali, I'm a final year haematology advanced trainee.  It's a pleasure to be here tonight to talk to all of you and really a pleasure to do some Southside representing, I was a Southside trainee all the way through and I'll go through my journey and my experiences and happy to talk further with anyone after the session as well.
So I finished med school in 2016 and came for internship at the PAH in 2017 and this was before you had to be an SHO to sign up to BPT rule came in so I actually signed up for basic physician training in my second year because I was fairly happy quite early on that that's the path I wanted to pursue so I signed up in my JHO year and six months into my JHO year the physicians training unit at PAH offered a step up to being a medical PHO, which was essentially a med reg roll, and I was, you know, happy to accept that so I started that halfway through my PGY2 year, went onto the formal network Med reg job in my PGY3 and PGY4 years as PGY2 and PGY3 and then at the end of my BPT3 year, I did my six month block out at Ipswich hospital as my secondment so again as Faseeha has said, this is the old sort of pathway so I don't believe this is on offer at present, but this is this is how I went through training. My exams were affected significantly by COVID with the written finishing just before COVID hit our exam. Our clinical exam was actually split into long cases and short cases as 2 separate exams so I did my longs from Ipswich at the end of 2020 and I my shorts actually in my first year of advanced training from Toowoomba as a provisional AT in the first month of my advanced training during that period and currently into the 4th year of Haematology training.
In terms of my experience with the Southside network, I mean, I can't really speak highly enough of it. It was an absolutely brilliant experience. I don't have pretty tropical photos unfortunately or photos of Woolloongabba and Ipswich, neither of which are very pretty, but I've got to say the volume of clinical work that you do across these sites and the breadth of exposure you get is really incredible. We have a very large catchment, and we have, you know, significant areas with underserved populations so we do see presentations, you know and late advanced stages and it's really, you know, been very exciting and very helpful to be involved in that all the way through my training, the other thing I was afforded at the PAH was I had significant amount of subspecialty exposure so I had two full terms on haematology, which is what I ended up choosing to do. I also had, you know, decent chunks of time sort of talking more than four weeks, either as a full term or during relieving blocks, which our PTU are really good about trying to organise so I had time in cardiology, respiratory, neuro, gastro, onc., including renal transplant, rheum and I also got to do an intensive care term for three months which was very, very helpful even from a haematology standpoint. One of the concerns that a lot of people have about coming to the PAH is oh it's a big, you know, city hospital, are we going to have, you know, accessibility, are people going to be mean or standoffish, look, I've got to say my experience has been that it's a very well supported hospital. I've always felt that there were people you could call, whether that's during in hours or after hours and especially who alluded to you really working with people who are pioneers and experts in the field, writing international guidelines and also some incredible people who I've maintained great relationships with, not just in haematology but outside as well, who I still pop in and see quite regularly actually now that I'm back.
From an exams, research, academia and advanced training perspective, I thought it prepared me very well for the exams, just purely based on the volume and complexity of day-to-day clinical work. There are also your dedicated didactic sessions, short and long case sessions, you've got public and private longs. There's also lots of opportunities to get involved with research so I got involved with a number of in-house that have audits and projects, there's clinical trials available depending on the department, you can certainly get involved if you're keen and like you know, currently collaborating, continuing my collaboration with TRI.  There are also opportunities to be involved with the PAH Southside medical school via UQ and I think overall BPT at the Southside network really prepared me, you know, quite well to transition and make that difficult transition to advanced training. I'll leave it at that. Thank you.

Thank you very much.
I'm Spencer Toombes I'm a general physician and director of physician education in Toowoomba Hospital. So, my hospital participates in the Southside rotation so I'm excited to see all the things available to our trainees when they disappear down to the Brisbane environment, 25% of my job is a medical director for the physician Training Network and for the next hopefully only a couple of minutes, I will tell you about the education for network trainees that the network provides. So obviously there are all sorts of educational resources everywhere for you to learn how to be a physician, there's obviously on the job training, the college provides a fantastic online lecture series, there are a bunch of commercial programmes that you can sign up to and pay money to be prepared for the written or the clinical exam.
But the network aims to provide equitable access to education and exam preparation for trainees, both at the Level 3 hospitals and at the level 2 hospitals which are developing quite a bit of kudos in terms of preparing people, particularly for the clinical exam, because pretty much every hospital involved in the network, with very few exceptions, are examination sites for the College of Physicians so you will find local physicians who are expert examiners and who are there to provide you with one-on-one training in those environments.
The network has a team of chief medical registrars, largely based at the larger hospitals who develop educational initiatives and communicate, you know what talks are on where, and what's on teams and when and how it's all going to fit together to support trainees statewide.
For people who are starting basic physician training we run an annual welcome event and provide an initial sort of focus for BPT1 training, we talk about stepping up to registrar team leadership, time management, we get a group of expert DPEs and trainees together to talk about how to plan your basic physician training and then there are a bunch of other educational resources. So, we provide specific MCQ tutorials on those hard-to-reach topics like clinical pharmacology and genetics, we run an MCQ bootcamp immediately before the February iteration of the exam, and we prepare an online practise MCQ exam essentially for everybody across Queensland to sit. We have a state based clinical exam preparation programme which people from Interstate pay money to come along to and we obviously charge just what it costs to run that for our local trainees and there's a bunch of Mater teaching resources which are also available online. There’s a thing called QIMEP, which is run by the advanced trainees in general medicine, which proves to be very popular for basic trainees as well. We do some performance psychology for exam sitters, and we provide access to other programmes, for example the A-Z for stroke management for basic physicians and I think that is all I have to say. We have hopefully caught up 30 seconds worth of time and I welcome Sid Sharma to talk on behalf of the Gold Coast.

Thank you, Spencer. So as mentioned, I'm Sid, I'm the coastal network rotation coordinator, also the DPE at Gold Coast University Hospital and I'm a renal and general physician.
So my aim was not to give you guys too many fancy nice photos, I'm sure QLD tourism does a fair enough job to attract people to the Gold Coast, but just in case I will put up a couple of backdrops there anyway, right, so look, you got my Chief Med Reg’s name and he was supposed to come here to help me present this.
Last year, my Chief Med reg did the same thing and didn't show up, he was buying a house that evening, so I said ok, fine he's setting some roots in Gold Coast, which is good and so this time I got a chief Med Reg that already had established themselves at the Gold Coast so I said wouldn't do the same, but goes and has a kid, so having had a child I said fair enough. What's good is that people who come to the Gold Coast, they end up staying and I think they've majority of people have found themselves at home on the Gold Coast.
Now we do have a few hospital mottos around and some videos that's around, but I don't think we need to go through those for the evening, they are on the website, because it might take a long time to go through it okay, but I just wanted to talk about the couple of training sites that we have and so the Gold Coast University Hospital, the Robina campus or Robina Hospital part of the same HHS. Again, Gold Coast University Hospital, 700 bed facility, getting extension of another 100 beds has increased another 100 beds recently as well, so we're getting close to 1000 beds very soon. Robina Hospitals, 400 beds and I think they just broke ground on Coomera Hospital, which is going to be another 400 beds so it's getting pretty busy. Population's growing lots of work, lots of fun okay so, then we have our other hospitals but outside of our HHS in Gold Coast, so we got Redland Hospital, another beautiful part of the state and it's a growing facility and we have members here who work in Redland Hospital, and they'll attest the fact that it's actually one of the busiest emergency departments in Australia. It's now getting its own ICU hopefully in the next year, if not sooner and is definitely a really nice part of the state. We also have Logan Hospital, which has been mentioned also on the Southside network so we share this hospital for rotations and as many of you have driven past the motorway about two years ago, you couldn't see the hospital from the motorway, but now you can because they've have plugged in another 10 stories on top of the facility so it's become quite big and definitely I think is a tertiary hospital to be honest.
Look again many of the presenters have already gone through this we also run a very full clinical exam preparation course everyone gets opportunities to do public long cases, at least two or three mock exams and we encourage people to rotate, so although we may be introducing our own networks here, we send people to a mock exam and PAH, PAH people come to us and we send to Logan and Redland, so yeah, we do mix around and give everyone as good an opportunity and experience as possible.  I forgot to mention that all our hospitals are examining hospitals so Gold Coast University Hospital hosts clinical exams, Logan Hospital also hosts clinical exams and now Redland Hospital is coming online and is hosting this year so technically I think the environment for learning and teaching is just quite great in all our facilities. Robina campus has hosted in the past, but most of the staff there work in both campuses so we just host a much bigger exam at GCH.
So we'll have multiple mock exams and also we get teaching from national examiners., There's also obviously written exam preparation courses, we actually run our own weekend preparation session, along with the state ones and there's also ongoing regular MCQ tutorials along with written preparation courses that run through the year and are protected teaching times.
This is beamed to all facilities and recorded on our own sort of network sites. So even if you are in Redland and did a night shift and you went through our web page or our portal and had a look at oh there was a great talk with this good topic you can watch it in the middle of the night or the next morning just before you go to bed so it's available to all our trainees within the network and same vice versa. If there's a really good presentation at Redland Hospital or Robina Hospital, we record that and make it available to everybody.
But what do people come here for? Success right. And that's what you guys all want and you don't want me to bore you with pretty pictures, people don't have to wear, you know, Stinger suits down at the Gold Coast but you know, but you also want facts and evidence, right? So that's what you get coming here, so 90% pass rate for the 2024 written exam and as you can see, this is not from me but from the college, they have sort of done a calculation and we were above the Queensland average for the pass mark for our candidates which is good. This is the distribution of the correctly answered questions on average, and the reason why I want to bring this up is that probably reflects the sub specialities that we have and don't have. So, you can see honestly that we don't have immunology, there's no immunology department. So, if you really want to be an immunologist you might want to do BPT training with us, but you might want to get some experience in other centres in Queensland so you know that's probably something that we need to brush up on and the other one is clinical pharmacology. But we have a clinical pharmacologist in Redland Hospital who does a lot of our teaching and so you can see over the years it's actually come almost to par with the rest of Queensland. So otherwise, we have all other specialties and in fact most of these are available in Logan Hospital as well, as there is a growing number of specialty training positions available in Redland Hospital and so as I said, most people will come and get most of their preferred rotations. Again, we need to make sure you fill all the requirements of physician training that the college has put out, and so we may choose to like if you keep saying I want to do cardiology, cardiology now for the third term in cardiology, we might say, hey, stop, it's probably not going to get counted and you need to actually do something else which will improve your chances of passing the exams okay, because you may be good with all the cardiology questions, but you need to be really good at say some oncology questions so we tried to make sure that we've given you the right guidance to actually have the right rotations, but at the same time, foster your interests and also give you the right educational supervisor who may be able to mentor you through the training programme in the future careers ok. So, as I said, you'll get rotations in all of these, and palliative care has just come online this year and we've also got critical care, now that's for our PGY5 plus people, ICU rotation can be for PGY3, but the critical care role is for PGY5 so in your, say, final year or as advanced training, you can do that role and it's actually a really good role to actually improve your MET response skills, leadership skills and looking after very acutely deteriorating patient skills as well as talking to multiple different stakeholders. So, I think it's really good in Redland, we have renal term now and with the onsite nephrologist so that's really good as well.  But as I said I'm sure you'll enjoy most of the time here.  Couple of other facts that I've sort of dug up and this was from and you can look well, you probably will have to participate in this is the medical training survey that goes around, one thing that I just saw is that 90% of our trainees strongly agreed that there would recommend the training position to other doctors, okay and 100% strongly agreed that they are interested in getting involved in medical teaching in their future and 100% intended or intend to continue on with their training programme there. So, I think that speaks volumes about probably the culture and that what we are trying to aim for is to make everyone feel like you are part of a team, part of a training programme and that once you feel that, you will want to impart that to your juniors in future.  I think you know that appearing close to that another I think fun fact, I don't think a crocodile has been spotted below the Noosa River to date right.
OK, I'm sure we'll have some time for questions later on so there's no, sorry, sorry. OK, I'll leave it at that, right. Thank you, guys.

Do you want to go somewhere beautiful, very beautiful, or even more beautiful? Welcome to QLD.
I'm just going to talk about the importance and what we as a network and a college will try and do for First Nations people of which we increasingly want to foster a culture of support for Aboriginal, Torres Strait Islander and Māori people working in QLD, these are directly from the college website, so there are lots of support available for Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander trainees.
Part of the ROC, the online community, which is dedicated to this area. There's a whole committee at college level that deals with this. There is a fee reimbursement initiative covering the cost of annual training and exam fees for eligible trainees, monthly check ins available, a specific wellbeing programme and some specific scholarships and prizes.
Along with a complementary physician’s briefcase with equipment for trainees eligible for the divisional clinical exam. So that's all college level support, and you'll keep hearing you will still get confused between college and network because everybody does but this is very much a college initiative that we are fully on board with and Paul has also already mentioned the placements for Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander trainees being advantageous for multiple reasons that we do that and the fee reimbursement initiative for eligible trainees identifying as Aboriginal and or Torres Strait Islander or Māori and or Pacifica not directly employed by district health boards in New Zealand. That's obviously for anybody not aware the college covers Australia and New Zealand.
In terms of what happens from there and so all of that information on the college website and cultural awareness, cultural safety training that we all undergo and are part of everything that we do to make sure what we do, Spencer has been doing an awful lot of work with some colleagues along with Vicki’s input for our selection processes, making sure that they are culturally safe and we're getting questions being reviewed by some of our colleagues from AIDA and elsewhere, already within Queensland Health.
We work with AIDA and the specialist trainee support programme, developing culturally safe initiatives, strengthening selection, recruitment and retention, which is probably as important as recruitment to make sure that this works because there are lots of challenges and so anybody in the room who does identify as an Aboriginal Torres Strait Islander, all of the information is in there for what you may need via the college portals. So, I just really wanted to put up front about all of that that's really important as part of what we do.

So Manjit, it’s back to crocodile. No, it's something totally different in Townsville.

That's alright, we do have crocs, but we have other things up in Townsville as well. So, my name's Manjit I'm the DPE in Townsville and I've got Bee here who was chief Med Reg and an advanced trainee, both of us were intensivists and saw the light and came back to general medicine. So, we are here to speak about both general medicine and BPT training, I want to leave it to Bee, and I'll chime in a bit later.
Yep. So, my name is Bee. I'm one of the gen med Advance trainees currently in Townsville who have been there for about 7 years now and I must say, Manjit the more I sit through the whole session, the more depressed I feel for Townsville because there's only brilliant rotations out there and look, my honest feel as a trainee who's been in Townsville for so long is that every if you're a good trainee, it doesn't matter where you go every single rotation has really good support. It's Queensland it is a really good state to do your training and essentially you get all the rotations, you get all the clinical experience and what makes a big difference for me as a trainee in Townsville is really the workplace culture and the lifestyle culture for me.  I really enjoy working in the place where there's this really collegiate atmosphere, very supportive. This is big emphasis on education amongst the trainees themselves.
Every single site has good pass rates based on what we see tonight. So that's not going to be a big differentiating factor. But I think what Simon did say just now when he talked about Cairns is that when you work in the hospital, that's less massive and you have that sort of nice, that sort of really close culture of a rural hospital. Your work becomes a happy place. So, you go to work, and I never ever feel depressed coming back from work. I look forward to going to work every day and it's really contributed to a very high quality of life for myself, not just as a trainee but as a person. So, I've met a lot of good friends in Townsville, so a great social network there and honestly, I can't ask for a better place to have done my training. So, take of it as you will, but I think you have to think about what you are looking for in life when you look up places to train. So, with that, I'll just talk quickly about some facts and numbers. Townsville is very far from here, 2020 kilometres, it's got an airport that's not particularly international, but it has enough flights to Brisbane that take you anywhere in the world. It will become international and then I am originally from Malaysia. I fly back twice a year every year that I've been in Townsville at least, and I go to Japan with my sister at least once a year, so I get 3 international holidays a year, so leave is very good.
Yes, and there's many direct flights to other major cities as well. Population is quite big, just purely in Townsville with 200,000. You've got a big catchment area and lots of other rural sites as well, so, yes, we say that we are the only regional tertiary centre in the country, but I believe that Cairns is now also tertiary based on what we learned today, we've got a big catchment area.  I've learned that thanks for educating me on that. So, it's kind of teaching closely associated with JCU. It's got close to 800 beds; it's also got a lot of plans to have expansion that's eight outpatient blocks being built. The Kidney transplant service is being developed with a goal to be open in the next year or so. We've got a massive amount of staffing and it's all in one service hospital, really if you come to Townsville as a BPT, you don't really go anywhere else. It's just one hospital and you get many, many different kinds of services. We have tertiary ICU level services. We've got a full stroke service, including clot retrieval, yeah, and it's also fully electronic and IEMR integrated which is I think a big factor for your quality of life at work itself.
Many, many services you can go read on our website rotations on offer. We've got all the major rotations. In fact, anything that you can want, Mount Isa, we have rotations there, but it's on a voluntary basis, so no one's ever forced to go there if that's not what they feel like doing and yeah, it's only one network. You spend all your time in Townsville. So I myself, spent all my time in Townsville so I didn't go to Mount Isa, but I had a lot of friends who went and have a lot of positive things to say about it, especially if an interest in rural medicine and in indigenous health, so we guarantee 2 specialty rotations per year for network trainees in all the three years.
So that explains the reasoning why, but practically all trainees are guaranteed 2 and if you go to Mount Isa you can get 3 specialty terms out of four in a year and yeah, just some statistics as to our successes in the exams. These are hard numbers, not just a statement about our success and a lot of our trainees actually transition to remaining in the network even as advanced trainees so I think it speaks for itself, people stay for a reason, if it's not a good environment or a good place, people leave. But we have a very high conversion rate on local trainees becoming advanced trainees in our hospital. I might let Manjit spruik our BPT unit for physician training here.
So as Bee has said we're a very active education hospital and we try and teach our trainees lot, but also, we invest in our trainees not as just as doctors, but as people. So, I have regular meetings with all our trainees to get to know them what's going on in their lives, what they've got coming up and important events and we factor that into their training programme. So, you get 2 specially terms, but if you've got a wedding coming up and you need that factored in, we make sure that happens and we do so very early. I'm already plotting the lines for year two and year three for our first-year trainees because we want to make sure that you get what you want.
We do have a good pass rate, but you also have something else, we're now teaming up with Cairns, we do teaching together, we send people back and forth. So it's not just the South East corner that work together we have that in the far north, we're together as well because we've got to fight those Crocs some way, don’t we Brian.
Alright, so this is who we are, so we got Vasant, myself and Craig. Craig is the NRC, but I'm here in his stead , because he's busy. We are very active in teaching, and we do a lot of the prep ourselves, but with the Holy Trinity of Bee and two other Med reg’s who including our, chief Med Reg, we have teaching virtually every single day and our consultants and our ATs are very active. The AT’s are particularly active because they stay in Townsville, they know what it's like and they want to make sure the current crop go through.  So, we will get you through your training. We will get you through your exams and then we will make sure that we try and get you onto the AT programme you want.
Perk’s and lifestyle, Townsville isn't as beautiful as Cairns, it does have Crocs, it does have some stingers, but you can get round those, you don't go in the water at certain times and you wear a Stinger suit. But what we do have is a lot of hiking, we have access to the Whitsundays, we can go scuba diving quite quickly. We can do all those things and lifestyles is a big thing about Townsville. I don't want my trainees staying past 04:06pm, which is the time they are meant to finish, so I weaponize the AVAC’s and I make sure you will get paid and that means that we get more doctors. We've just got funding for another 8 registrars next year because the hospital's listened to us that we need to make sure we support all of you, so you've got that work life balance. Rent is cheaper, property’s cheaper, I've got a house on the water, I don't go into it cause of the crocs but it's a third of the price of the similar property here in Brisbane. Ok, you save money during basic training, you can live quite closely, we've got a half decent NRL team, who got beat by dolphins. This is a video that I think we will save for the sake of time we probably won't play, but this is some trainees, we will leave these on the website so you can see them. I've also got three videos here from a current BPTs.  A BPT who trained with us and is now an AT, and a BPT2 who became an AT, went down South and then came back up as a consultant, that's Emma, she's a Gen Med and geriatrician. But we do keep people, we will put these up on the website so you can look at your leisure because we haven't got enough time now, but that's a testament that you know we not only train people, we retain them and that's the biggest thing about Townsville, we invest in you, so you will come back and invest in us as a community.
Alright, thank you.

Ok, so thanks very much. We've got one final speaker for tonight from the Northside rotation, we've got Tasnim Zirapury the NRC and no more network presentations here, so we'll just head it straight onto Tasnim’s talk about the Northside rotation.

Thank you, guys. Thank you for giving me this opportunity to take you through a little bit of what it's like to train with the Northside network. My name is Tasnim Zirapury and I'm the rotation coordinator as Paul introduced and I'm also a nephrologist working at Rockhampton Base Hospital.
Alright, so what’s it like to train at the northside? We are one of the biggest training networks in Queensland and we offer training across 7 accredited training sites. Three of them are tertiary centres, Royal Brisbane, Prince Charles and the Sunshine Coast, along with its other secondment hospitals, that's Gympie, Nambour and Caloundra and we've got four Level 2 or regional hospitals based at Caboolture, Redcliffe, Mackay and Rockhampton.
I will skip the training lines because it has been touched on a little bit earlier on and maybe I can just talk about it later due during the Q&A sessions.
But we do have a few unique features that I can take you through.
Alright so to talk a little bit about the training sites that we've got, one of the biggest tertiary sites we've got is the Royal Brisbane Hospital. I don't need to tell you where it is because we are here physically at the moment. I just realised that a little while ago. Yes, it shares its campus with the clinical Skills Development Centre, which is across the road. You might have seen it as you walked in, which is known for its simulation-based learning courses, and it also shares its campus with the Queensland Institute of Medical Research.  It is the largest and one of the oldest teaching hospitals in Queensland and maybe even in Australia, and if you work here, you will get a well-rounded training experience which is very well recognised. The training programme itself is very well established and structured because of the period that it's been around for, and you'll have the opportunity to train with a lot of college veterans.  The DPE here is going to be Dr Susan Petrie, who will be looking after you pretty well.

So, Prince Charles Hospital is another large tertiary centre. It's not very far from the Royal Brisbane, probably about 10-15 minutes’ drive from here, and it is a leading cardiothoracic Surgical hospital, and it provides super specialised care in cardiac and lung transplants and cystic fibrosis, along with a wide variety of other medical subspecialties.  It is reputed for its excellent training programme and also for its work life balance.
So the Sunshine Coast University Hospital I don't think there would be anyone in this room who wouldn't be familiar with where Sunshine Coast is and would know it as a popular tourist destination. Well known for its surfing, beaches and rainforest.
It is part of the Sunshine Coast Hospital and Health services and as I previously mentioned, you do have opportunities of getting seconded to Gympie, Nambour and Caloundra from there.  One of the privileges I think of working at Sunshine Coast Hospital is that the DPE there is Doctor Paul Jauncey, whom you've already met, who is one of the directors on the network and you couldn't be in better hands when it comes to wanting someone to guide you through your training experience.
Alright, so taking you through our level 2 hospitals, Redcliffe Hospital has the advantage of being only about 35 kilometres away from Brisbane, so maybe about 1/2 an hour's drive, so it's not very far at all. You can live in Brisbane and still work there and it does provide a very good teaching programme as well, and it has almost all the medical subspecialties bar a couple and you can find those details on our website later on and I could talk you through that as well.
It has got a good teaching programme and the DPE there is Dr Chris Tan, who is actually one of the national examiners as well.
Caboolture Hospital, so it's set in a very rapidly expanding area of Queensland and the health service there is expanding very rapidly as well. It offers some training in almost all subspecialties again, and the list keeps growing every year.
They're quite keen when it comes to education as well, and their training programme keeps improving every year with collaboration from other sites as well, I must say that and the DPE there is Doctor Simone Costa, who is a very young DPE and a very keen physician and a keen educator.
So Mackay Base hospital, you've already seen a lot of natural beauty in Queensland, so I don't think this comes as a surprise to you and it is obviously set in a backdrop of iconic beaches and rainforest so I don't want to go into that anymore because I think you must be bored by now, you've seen enough of that.  It was one of the first hospitals, the regional hospitals that had a fully electronic based system and you have keen educators over there as well. One of the key trainers over there has actually written a book herself on how to pass the FRACP exams. So, you’ll actually be in good hands over there and the DPE there is the Dr Belinda Weich, who will be looking after you pretty well as well.
Finally, the Rockhampton hospital this is where I'm based, and I work as a nephrologists over there and we do provide a lot of subspecialties and reasonable training programme over there as well.  We do collaborate with other sites about exam preparation, and you have lots and lots of opportunities over there for research, including opportunity to enrol in a free researcher Grant programme, which has been developed for employees in Central QLD.
These are all the rotations that are available, and I don't think that this is an exhaustive list. I'm sure there are a lot more rotations and they'll all be out there on our website, so I don't think you need me to go through this in details at the moment.  Similarly, here there here are the contacts so that's me right at the top and I'm happy for you all to contact me any time after this. Sorry, it's not enough time to do a lot of justice to so many sites in such a short period, but I'm happy to take questions after the session and even after later on if you want to contact me via e-mail or even just want to give me a call, I would be happy to take you through some more details of the training that we offer. Our project officer is Beth Parker, who's on leave unfortunately at the moment, so she couldn't come and meet you all here today and these are the other contacts that we've got on the northside rotation, are the DPE's and the chief medical registrars. Their details can be found on our website so you don't need to bother or worry about copying this down at the moment.
So before I leave you all with the testimonials, they're just a couple of things that I would like to say right at the end is that we are a very extensive sort of network as you can see we cover almost half of QLD, but despite that, and despite the diversity in the training provided across our sites, we actually collaborate with each other and work really together to make sure that you get a good tailored programme to meet your needs, so for each individual trainees, we try to match their needs by working together across sites.
And about the exam preparation, I guess that's something that you would want to know. The exam pass rates. I don't like numbers, but I should probably say this, that our numbers and pass rates have been pretty high. So mostly in the high 80s and 90s and with our regional centres in particular, we've had an almost 100% pass rate up to up to this year. I say almost because just at the last minute this year we had one candidate fail from a regional centre which might have brought that number from 100, but it's almost  close enough I guess.
As I said, I'm not a fan of numbers because we focus on trying to provide a good training environment and a good structured exam preparation so our focus is on that rather than looking at our numbers at the end because there are too many variables contributing that.

So thank you very much for that. I'll leave you with the testimonials you can read through it and I'm happy to take questions at the end. Thank you.

So big thank you to all our speakers and particularly those who fly in quite a distance as we've seen on Google Maps, today to be with us, I think probably what might round things off is, as you can see, there's lots of nuances to the different rotations, but probably one of the key things is that you play a big role in that and your approach and you'll find opportunities and all the different rotations, there's different styles of and different approaches and different things you might experience. But to an extent it's the attitude you bring to the rotation and how you find those opportunities and how you make the most out of each training placement and also each individual rotation. Each individual shifts the learning opportunities are there and it's really if you have the mindset of how I can get the learning opportunities from this opportunity that's being presented to me, you really will succeed in basic physician training.

Now I'm going to see if there's some way I can get to the team’s group, unless Cathlin wants to give me some ideas as to what the main themes are.
Have to stop sharing I suppose.

OK, so that looks like there's a question on teams.

If some of your PGY2 year has been locuming, does this still count in terms of being PGY experience?

Yeah, it does, like PGY3 is sort of the how far out of Med school you are for eligibility. In terms of does count for clinical experience. It really depends on whether it's a full term or a little bit of terms in general, probably not for clinical experience, but yeah sort of depends. Sometimes people do locum contracts there about four months in length, and that may count, but it depends on the situation. But if you did locuming in PGY2 and you're going to be PGY3 next year, yes, you're eligible.

Keep the questions going through on the chat. But are there any questions in the room?
We're not scary.
I think they might be.
Oh the question there.
Thank you. I just had a question about selection criteria.  Particularly with like medical subspecialty terms and rural terms, if you've got a regional term or a subspecialty term plan for later in the year like term 4 or term 5, does that still count towards your application for BPT next year?

Yeah, we were just discussing this yesterday as a panel and it doesn't count and the reason for that it's tricky. The reason for that being, basically is some people at certain sites may not know what their terms are for the second half of the year. Also, some people may not complete those terms for probably more the former.  So, at the moment, it's the terms are being completed thus far that counts, and it's a tricky one. You can make valid arguments one way or another. We had to draw the line in the sand one way, and that's why it's come out that way.
Good question. Thank you.

So, if you have leave during the interviews for BPT can you defer them?

You need to go through the interviews. As you as you can see the interviews, go for a couple week period. So, we do need you to sit one of the interviews but let us know what your circumstances are and ideally where you are in the world. Like honestly, we have tried to schedule people early in the day to try and meet up with French time or later in the day to meet up with Canadian time. We'd be trying to do it. We can. I'm unfortunately sometimes we can’t, and I have had a few people I've interviewed at 3:00 AM their time. But they actually do surprisingly well, so I don't know, maybe waking up in the middle of your sleep cycle is actually a good thing for interview.
OK.
Alright, well, where did we get to? Sorry, I'm trying to keep up with the group. Yeah, so interviews.
So in terms of the overseas sort of specialty pathway, those sorts of things, it's probably best to e-mail us directly, but that's not so much basic physician training that's actually more contacting a hospital directly from an AT level position. That's a separate process to, to BPT. So, if you need to do a year supervised AT practise, if it's gen Med, you can possibly reach out to us, and we might be able to find someone. But it really comes down to finding a specific hospital for that.

Is it possible to get rotated Interstate or from one network to another?
We used to try and have a pathway where people would do some time in one rotation and sometime in another rotation, and unfortunately there wasn't actually that much interest, and we couldn't quite get it to work. So, it's sort of a special consideration if you are looking to move from one rotation to another, just approach us early and then what happens is the people you've seen here tonight talk to one another and say, OK, how can we try and make this work? So, it's not absolutely guaranteed not certainly, we suggest you choose a rotation you want to spend all three years in but certainly we do have people who do move, but how and when and why and what happens.  The basic principle we use for any special consideration is, what's the impact to other trainees, to the training affected is applying that, what's impact to other trainees and what's the impact of the people that they're servicing and we try and make sure we don't leave a hospital dramatically short staffed and similarly we want to make sure we don't have all the other hospitals, or all the other trainees in that site suffering.

And how rotations divided within the Northside network, given that covers quite a number of hospitals?

Well sort of similar to what you saw with the Southside. There's a number of different rotations and number of different training plans and we will have some examples of those training programmes on the website before the application, but it's a mixture of 12, six month rotations between the different hospitals.
A lot of lines are centred around one tertiary hospital, but there are some lines that go between the two, tertiary hospitals and some people like spending a bit more time in one tertiary hospital. Some people like spreading their wings a bit. That's certainly what I did. I did a bit of timing right now as well before the networks, but big time in Cairns to be the time Prince Charles been time at Redcliffe and got to meet a whole bunch of different people that way.
So does research count towards the PGY2 and PGY1 selection criteria?

Not in terms of clinical experience, but there are some aspects where we do look at quality improvement and research exposure in your short statements. So that does play a role plus you can learn some leadership skills, you learn some managerial skills that are transferable to the wards and so that might help you with the interviews there.
Someone who's eligible for general registration late Feb?
I think talk to us about it if your sort of a bit borderline on the criteria, just reach out to us directly and we try and be as flexible as possible, certain things within the college are fairly fixed, but sometimes we can talk to the college as well and there may be some flexibility there. So, if your sort of on the verge of fitting into to one category another, I think if you're getting your general Reg in June next year, you're probably not going to be coming in, you shouldn't be applying this year. You'll be looking at applying maybe mid-year next year if you're sort of late February and it's a bit uncertain and you're waiting on AMC clinical things. Just talk to us.
What we try and do is put people through the selection process. If we think they're likely to be suitable and if things don't quite pan out, then we all have a bit of a chat and we've all got close networks, closer links with the college as well to discuss these things.
Um.
Where are we?
OK. Are there opportunities to step up from Reg to SHO mid-year?

It really depends on the setting. That that sort of thing we leave up to the setting. And so that depends on what the vacancies are like in Reg, what terms are available for registrar step ups. Normally there are step up opportunities and there are some people who might be offered an SHO position through our selection process but may even be able to offer a step up opportunity at the beginning of the year. But we leave that up to the setting because they know what their workforce is. And I guess if you step up from an SHO to a reg you leave a HR vacancy behind but certainly it's quite common that people do get an opportunity to step up.
But it again depends on workforce demands, availability of terms and those sorts of things.
Um about swapping. Yeah, swapping networks again. It's really, it's kind of a special consideration. It does happen, and for a number of  different reasons.
So RPL overseas graduates, it really depends on how comparable your programme is to the RACP. So, it is really an individualised decision. UK programmes are very, very similar and they've got very similar portfolio system and very similar curriculum. But it really depends on what you're Curriculum is based on and what sort of workplace-based assessments are done. So, it really is, individually assessed.
Can we get shortlisted for interview for multiple networks?

So basically, choose the network you want to apply to. However, should you not get a position within that network rotation, then your interview is valid for another rotation. So, if you go for Cairns and you're unsuccessful with the Cairns position but there's spaces down on the Northside and that's your second preference, we do go through and get you to preference the rotations. You can be offered a position there so there's no need to interview for multiple networks as it carries across the different networks but you'll obviously, if you go from the Northside we consider for Northside 1st and then people who get second round offers will depend on what space is available second to that, yeah, what's available after we've considered all the first round preferences.
Nearly there. So general registration of January 2025?

Yep. Yep. Yeah. If you're expecting general registration and the reason, we have the general registration rule is you need that to sign up to the college. If you don't have general reg, you can't sign up to the college. So, if you're reasonably expecting that in January or even February before the deadline, you're going to have general registration apply this year. We go full steam ahead. If they're hiccups with your general registration, we can look at that later on. But yeah, certainly January 2025, definitely. Now we know that things have changed, and you've got to do 12 months and you might have to be six months through.
Oh OK it any last questions from the room?

If not, we might move outside there, so feel free to wander around, have a chat to the people from different rotations, have a chat to the NRCs or the trainees who are here to get a bit of a feel for what's there, ask any questions. Furthermore, if you have any questions after tonight that's striking you on your drive home. Just e-mail physician training. We have all sorts of questions weird and wonderful. There's no such thing as a silly question. So, we're very happy to answer them and check in with the network web page, it’s a really great source for a lot of information.
And also have a look at the College BPT handbook. It's got a few questions more from a college point of view, but it also helps a little give you a bit of an idea as to what's involved with basic physician training as well and talk to your registrars, talk to the medical SHOs, talk to your bosses, talk to everyone around. This is a great stage. Just really think about what you're training could look like and what you want from your training to set off on the right foot and really head on the right trajectory towards physician practise in six and a bit years’ time.

Alright. Thanks everyone.