OTs, medical students respond to Commonwealth Prac Payment expansion

To support Australia’s future healthcare workforce and provide cost of living relief for students, the Australian Government has announced it is expanding the Commonwealth Prac Payment to 10 key frontline health professions.

With unpaid practical placements forming a key part of healthcare degrees — in some courses, such as radiography, forming more than a year of the degree — paid prac provides financial support.

Paid prac already covers eligible teaching, nursing, midwifery and social work students, and will now expand to eligible students studying the following 10 courses:

• audiology
• clinical psychology
• occupational therapy
• paramedicine
• pharmacy
• physiotherapy
• podiatry
• radiography
• rehabilitation therapies
• speech pathology
   

During their clinical and professional placement periods, eligible students currently receive $338.60 per week. A means-tested payment, it is benchmarked to the single Austudy rate and indexed annually.

Response: Occupational Therapy Australia

Occupational Therapy Australia CEO Samantha Hunter called the expansion “a major and long-overdue step towards addressing placement poverty across the allied health sector”. Hunter also said:

“For too long, students have been expected to give up paid work while also covering significant travel, accommodation and living costs simply to complete the training required to enter the profession. While this payment will not cover every expense, it will provide meaningful support and reduce the risk of students being priced out of their qualifications.”

Hunter added that “paying students only solves one side of the placement equation. Students also need a practice willing and able to train them.

“Providing a clinical placement can cost an allied health business thousands of dollars. Experienced clinicians must reduce the time they spend seeing clients to supervise students, while practices also absorb additional administration, insurance and operational costs.

“In a system increasingly driven by billable hours, many practices simply cannot afford to take clinicians away from clients, even when they want to support the next generation.

“Paid prac is significant progress, but it is not the complete solution. The next priority must be supporting allied health practices to offer more placements, including in regional and remote communities, so students can complete their training and enter the workforce Australia urgently needs.”

Response: Australian Medical Students’ Association

Among the other responses to the announcement was reaction from the Australian Medical Students’ Association (AMSA) which, in a statement, said it “celebrates the win for our Allied Health colleagues, but is devastated and confused at the exclusion of medical students who complete the most rigorous placement hours, between 2000–4000.

“Australia’s medical system already has an inherent and insidious structural imbalance, medical workforce distribution massively undersupplies rural, remote, First Nations and low income communities.

“Although medical schools recruit students from these areas, they are not supported to complete 2–4 years of full-time, rigorous and unyielding placement. This has led to disastrous outcomes, such as an attrition rate of up to 45% for First Nations medical students.

“Lack of workforce diversity in Australian health care is driving some of this nation’s greatest failures. Health gaps are directly linked to diversity inequities in the medical workforce.”

In its statement, AMSA called on the Australian Government to “urgently” include medical students in the Commonwealth Prac Payment.

Image credit: iStock.com/Hispanolistic