Study draws ‘roadmap’ for supporting IMGs

International medical graduates (IMGs) comprise around two thirds of Australia’s rural general practice workforce. Yet many land in their new workplaces, in a new country, with little scaffolding to support them to become comfortable and empowered in their careers, a study has found.
 
In response, new research based on creating a ‘roadmap’ for IMGs throughout their journey is hoped to be a start towards developing that support.
 
The study’s lead author and Director of Research at Monash University’s School of Rural Health, Professor Belinda O’Sullivan, said while many IMGs work in rural general practice, the move can be a complex one.
 
‘It’s not an easy thing to be a rural GP, and we’re putting them in the hardest environment possible, and expecting them to thrive,’ she told newsGP.
 
‘In the rural setting, they’re treating people who are the most underserviced in Australia, so they’re seeing the hardest clinical caseload … they’re living in communities that are so foreign to them.’
 
Published in the MJA, the research developed the roadmap using online semi-structured interviews, focus groups and intermittent feedback cycles with 41 participants, including 28 IMGs.
 
The research identified three stages of support for IMGs, starting with entering and acclimatising to Australia, followed by moving to a rural community, and then family focused training to match community needs and build a sense of professional belonging and bonding.
 
Researchers say the roadmap depicts ‘strategies needed across the pathway for IMG comfort/empowerment, confidence, competence, belonging and bonding, for gaining qualifications, feeling valued and settled’.
 
While the RACGP already has a suite of online resources available to help IMGs along their journey, Chair of the RACGP’s National IMG Committee, Associate Professor Ayman Shenouda, said the report identifies the need for such a roadmap.
 
‘Despite all the services that IMGs are putting into rural areas, there’s not a huge interest in addressing those issues,’ he told newsGP. ‘But the interest is starting to build up.’
 
He said the IMG Committee is also working on its own roadmap ‘as a responsibility to IMGs’, with a view to collaborating with other organisations.
 
‘As we’re developing it, we are now talking about “how can we collaborate with other organisations to come up with the same solution, or to endorse other solutions, and other organisations endorse what the RACGP is doing?”,’ Associate Professor Shenouda said.
 
‘The college is willing to work with other organisations that are involved in similar projects.’

He said that IMGS could often get caught up in the ‘spaghetti of information’ through online platforms.
 
‘There’s a lot of information out there, especially these days with social media and I know that IMGs themselves have got their own social media platforms that can be sometimes confusing, because everyone is talking about their own experience,’ he said.
 
‘It’s good to share experiences and to get the positive out of it, but sometimes, unfortunately, it can be negative things that are coming out of it.

‘So, the spaghetti of information about IMGs and what IMGs can do and what they cannot do is our responsibility, as a college, to navigate this spaghetti and to untangle it and to come up with something that is fit for purpose.’
 
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IMG international medical graduate roadmap rural GP