Specialties

Medicine offers many career choices – from clinical practice to public health, medical education and clinical research. There are also many options for practice, from sole private practice to large teaching hospitals. You could be based in a major city or work in a community setting in rural and regional Australia. The types of medicine you will experience in each of these environments can be vastly different. To help you with this very important and possibly daunting decision, below are Specialty and Trainee Profiles.

Profiles have been developed using the National Health Workforce Dataset (NHWDS) 2021 collections for Medical Practitioners (Western Australia). This data is provided by the Commonwealth Department of Health using Medical Practitioners registration and survey data collected in 2021. Nationally the medical survey response rate is 94.3% (2015).

More information on the data build and quality can be accessed here

Advanced vocational trainee data is sourced from Medical Education and Training Data 2020 – Chapter 4 Vocational training, available here

Map Locations: Location is derived from national health survey question – “the address at which you predominantly practise the profession, or your principal place of residence if you are not practising your profession or are not practising predominantly at one address”. This data is validated against data from the National Health Services Directory, health map to confirm delivery location.

Methods: Data is analysed using SAS and Tableau.

Further Information

Please contact [email protected] with any questions regarding information.

Specialist: Specialists are identified as those having a specialist registration.

Specialty: Primary specialty is determined using the survey responses for hours and speciality cross checked with the Australian Health Practitioners Regulation Agency (Ahpra) registration data. Specialties are then grouped in accordance with the list of specialties utilised by the Office of the Chief Medical Officer (OCMO) for workforce planning.

Headcount: Workforce profiles include only practitioners whose principal state of practice is Western Australia and workforce status is “Employed in Australia working in registered profession”.

FTE: Full-time equivalent (FTE) is a ratio measuring the amount of time an individual works that standardises workloads of employed practitioners. FTE is calculated based on the hours worked in a standard week. One FTE is one-person equivalent to a full-time position (40 hours for medical).

Average Hours: Average by speciality of the number of hours the practitioner worked in total in (profession) in the previous week from the question “LAST WEEK, how many hours did you work in total as an (profession)?”

Clinical Hours: Average by speciality of the number of hours the practitioner worked in non-clinical roles in previous week from the question “LAST WEEK, how many hours did you work in total in clinical roles?”

Non-clinical Hours: Average by speciality of the total number of hours the practitioner worked in all roles in the previous week from the question “LAST WEEK, how many hours did you work in total in non-clinical roles?”

Median Age: Median by specialty of age of person in years at close of registration.

Age Pyramid: Number of practitioners by specialty by gender and age group.

Location of Main Job: Location derived from principal remoteness area code based on the address practitioner predominantly practises the profession. The Remoteness Area (RA2016) is based on the ABS ASGS SA1 and includes 5 categories. Note categories are categorised from 0 to 4 (Major Cities to Very Remote). For the purposes of this visualisation all regional and remote areas are grouped.

Sector of Main Job: By specialty – sector in which a health practitioner works the most hours in their registered profession (public, private, both).

A full glossary of terms is available here