Locum and Regional Specialists Tamworth director Mian Bi says demographics cause health workforce shortages

That's the view of managing director of Regional Specialists Tamworth Dr Mian Bi, who has worked as a locum in metropolitan, regional and rural environments.

NSW health minister Ryan Park has vowed to address what he calls an "unsustainable" reliance on temporary doctors in the state's health system, but Dr Bi said it was fundamental demographic shifts causing health workforce shortages.

Dr Bi said people studying to become doctors were finishing their training later, so were already settled into the cities where they studied before graduating into a medical career.

"Once you have a family, once you have a child, it's very difficult to move regionally, because you already have those things in place," he said.

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As female doctors take up high-powered careers of their own, Dr Bi said the whole family unit is "much less mobile than it used to be".

"Those are the demographic issues you're never going to solve by a broad stroke policy or anything like that," he said.

"People fundamentally don't want to sacrifice their family to go work in the country anymore, and we need to come up with new innovative models to support that demographic shift."

The Sydney-based doctor started Regional Specialists Tamworth to address doctor shortages, and the private model brings locally-based and fly-in specialists together.

It's a group practice scenario where there's other doctors within the same specialty, or other clinicians in the clinic who can support one another, which reduces a lot of criticism that a fly-in-fly-out option is unsustainable, he said.

"Ultimately, when you're a locum, it's a trade off between how much you earn and the stability of your position, so something has to give, and there has to be a trade off somewhere," Dr Bi said.

"Until that happens, we're gonna still be stuck in the current system we have where you can't get people to work in a particular area, because of the very rigid models that we impose on clinicians."

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