Meanwhile, the college has made changes to the Australian General Practice Training and the Fellowship Support Programs.
Meeting supervisor professional development hours will not affect training accreditation, but concerns remain over the sustainability of GP supervision.
Meanwhile, the RACGP has announced changes to the Australian General Practice Training and the Fellowship Support Programs.
GP supervisors, unlike their hospital-based counterparts, receive almost no remuneration for training registrars.
Training practices get a subsidy and a teaching allowance, but these may not always be passed on to the supervisor.
There’s no money for the actual task of clinical supervision.
This year’s pre-budget submission from the likes of ACRRM, the RDAA and General Practice Supervision Australia talked to the need for targeted funding for GP supervisors to, as GPSA put it, “reverse the tide” on the dwindling general practice workforce.
Last year – around a year into the transition of training back to the colleges – the RACGP released a supervisor professional development (SPD) guideline, detailing the expectations for SPD and promising a stipend for training sites meeting estimated SPD hours.
To qualify for the stipend, three hours of SPD per registrar per semester must be performed across the training site.
There are no requirements on how many hours each individual accredited supervisor can contribute, e.g. one supervisor could do five hours and another one hour, to meet a total of six hours for the semester.
“Training sites with a registrar in any term other than extension awaiting fellowship will receive $500 per registrar per semester, capped at 4 registrars (maximum 12 hours),” said the college.
Before the training transition, RTOs entrusted GPSA to take care of supervisor development.
GPSA provides a broad range of educational material, including the ability to listen to content asynchronously.
“We created a [SPD] schedule that works for our 10,200 members,” GPSA CEO Carla Taylor told The Medical Republic.
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“We actually know what they need, because they vote with their feet, they don’t pay us anything.
“They like to be able to do [the development] because it’s free and at their convenience.”
The RACGP’s SPD hours, in general, require “active” participation, meaning real-time attendance.
The GPSA’s CPD-accredited supervision webinars are not recognised by the RACGP as SPD.
Ms Taylor said that she understood that the RACGP wanted touchpoints with GP supervisors who were receiving part of the college’s training program grant, but adding more hoops to supervisor development requirements meant that “the stipend isn’t achievable”.
She said that unclear communication around the outcome of not meeting the three-hour-per-registrar SPD estimate had caused concern among some regional teams, which rely on trainees, fearing that their accreditation may be affected.
This has now been clarified in the RACGP’s SPD guide.
“It should be noted that the SPD hours supported by the stipend is not a requirement for accreditation nor do the estimated SPD hours represent a minimum number of hours for a practice to complete,” said the college.
“The requirement for accreditation is that over the three-year accreditation cycle all supervisors in the practice will undertake SPD.
“The only impact of the practice not completing the estimated SPD hours is that the stipend will be paused.”
Ms Taylor said that GPSA acted in complement to the colleges, not in competition.
“Our delivery for SPD, or any CPD, is about supervising at the highest level in terms of building [supervisors’] confidence so that, in turn, builds [their] competence,” she said.
“We don’t inflict on supervisors what they need to teach. We’ll give them topic information … We just help with how they can deliver that at top of scope.
“[Our concerns are] supervisors, the training practices and keeping them viable, because without them, the training program doesn’t exist, and that’s our concern.
“We just want to make sure … that [supervisors] are recognised and they’re rewarded, they’re respected.
“They’re not being very well respected when they’re being told they have to jump through hoops that are somewhat artificial.”
Ms Taylor said GPSA was calling on the government and organisations to invest in GPs supervision, rather than putting all effort into building trainee numbers.
“Let’s not put all of our focus on growing tomorrow’s fellows. Let’s actually be focused on growing tomorrow’s GP supervisors, because then you’ve got a perpetuating cycle of evolving general practice into what it needs to be for the future.”
Meanwhile, on the topic of training, the royal college has announced changes to both the Australian General Practice Training program and the Fellowship Support Program.
Doctors on the AGPT will no longer have to provide referees or have an active permanent residence application at the time of applying, and there will be a single national online entry exam that can be sat remotely.
“What we’re trying to do here is streamline the application processes and align them with modern standards,” RACGP president Dr Michael Wright told TMR.
“By doing that we’re making our training programs more accessible for candidates while still maintaining high standards of care and patient quality.”
Application selection fees have also been reduced and requirements to show completion of surgery and emergency medicine rotations will be dropped from 2026.
GPs-in-training on the FSP will have a new requirement to show at least 12 months of general practice experience in Australia over the past four years before applying.
This, Dr Wright said, will make it clearer that the pathway is intended for doctors with existing GP experience.
“Now is an important time to do this, particularly as the college is now successfully filling all its AGPT places [for the 2025 training year],” Dr Wright said.
“It’s really important that these changes are … designed to make the program more transparent, but also easier for people to apply, and that they clarify exactly what the expectations are when they go into them.”
While the AGPT pathway is the most common entry point to general practice, it caters to early-career doctors who are permanent residents or Australian citizens.
The FSP pathway, meanwhile, is shorter, self-funded and more geared toward international medical graduates and non-vocationally registered doctors.
It replaced the RACGP’s Practice Experience Pathway programs when Commonwealth funding for the scheme dried up in 2022.
Both lead to a fellowship with the RACGP and have the same set of exams.
