After the basic degree both must do a year of supervised practice (internship for doctors, graduate nurse for nursing). A doctor can then specialise, which takes between 4 or 5 years for most (including general practice). 6 years uni, 2 years intern/resident, 5 years specialist training (which is mostly done in an apprenticeship on the job training style) makes 13 years.

After uni and a grad year to become a nurse practitioner you must do a masters degree (2 or 3 years), have 3 to 5 years clinical experience and then another 2 years doing the practitioner training - 3+1+2+5+2 = 13, the same 13 that a doctor has to have.

Now I did the 6 years at medical school, then I farted about for a while deciding what I wanted to do and finally started anaesthetic training after 6 years, 2 years of which I spent as a country GP. I then took a further 7 years to gain specialist fellowships in both anaesthesia and intensive care - a total of 19 years. A long haul, far too long to do some of the sort of work a GP does - write referrals to specialists and repeat prescriptions. This is simple stuff and does not need a medical degree, it is best separated off and the more difficult work can then have more attention devoted to it from the docs.

The docs wife is also wrong. The AMA does not support nurse practitioners one little bit, they’ll die in a ditch to stop it and will want to cut my nuts off for supporting the opposition. It’s all about preserving the mystique of doctors power and authority over the community and the nursing profession in particular. It’s also about trying to preserve doctors incomes (what any good union should do for it’s members).

At the Uni of Sydney, it takes only 3 years to get a medical degree (students require a bachelor degree in anything to apply).

But time spent at uni and the money spent on a course etc are beside the point. Having studied medicine myself and having doctors in the family, one has to say that there is no benefit in perpetuating the deeply ingrained and flawed medical hierarchy. Especially the master-slave relationship of doctors and nurses that some still want to continue.

A long time ago, medical and other professionals were ‘educated’ in the sense that other workers (eg nurses) were not. This is clearly no longer the case.

Nurses and other paramedicals are more than capable of rendering medical treatment and prevention in many cases. In fact, they are often better than doctors with little or no experience of a situation or procedure.

There is nothing magical about a bachelor degree in medicine. (And why is Brendan Nelson called Dr Nelson where it is irrelevant, but it’s not Diplomat Rudd, Lawyer Gillard, Engineer Jones, etc?)

Medical personnel should be treating people in the best medical manner possible, not according to some universal, rigid and outmoded set of position descriptions. Nor with doctors trying to engineer demarcation disputes.

Obviously, where medical practitioners refuse to work in some areas, despite large inducements, someone has to do the work. Simple as that.

The medical system is not working now, and is getting steadily worse. The whole edifice needs to be changed to reflect modern medical challenges.