Workforce Working Group

The AMA Queensland Workforce Working Group was established by the AMA Queensland Council to provide advice and make recommendations to attract and retain Queensland’s medical workforce. The group met from early to mid 2025 to identify the challenges and opportunities available across the crucial domains of Queensland’s health workforce, including:

  • The health system as a whole, including cultural issues – the ecosystem in which doctors work must be fit-for-purpose to meet the needs of patients and doctors into the future
  • The role of a doctor – how it was, how it is now and what it needs to become to continue delivering the healthcare patients deserve
  • The medical training pipeline – where we attract and grow the next generation
  • General practice – the backbone of our health system, providing world-class preventive and early intervention health services for the entire community, from the cradle to the grave
  • Public hospitals – that provide Queenslanders with lifesaving tertiary services and essential training grounds for our medical graduates
  • Private hospitals – that ensure patients and doctors have healthcare and workplace choice and encourage innovation.

Action plan

The group developed a series of profession-led recommendations across these workforce domains for implementation by government and health organisations throughout Queensland and Australia. Patients deserve a health system that keeps them well now and into the future and these recommendations are essential to securing it. There is no time to lose.

You can read the full breakdown of each domain in the Workforce Working Group Action Plan. 

Read the action plan

Action plan summary

The recommendations set out in the action plan provide a profession-led road map to bolster our medical workforce to meet the health needs of our community. AMA Queensland acknowledges the simultaneous efforts being made by government and other health organisations to this end, however, any solutions adopted must be fully supported by the medical profession. That means securing buy-in across all specialty groups and especially from doctors who maintain a frontline clinical FTE. Measures imposed on, rather than crafted in collaboration with, clinicians will not succeed.

The solutions in the action plan are doctor-led with the full support of Queensland’s peak medical body. AMA Queensland looks forward to working with Queensland Health, private hospital providers, GP and specialist clinic owners and other stakeholders to implement them and secure a sustainable medical workforce for us all.