Background: In Australia and New Zealand, the numbers of intensive care medicine trainees have increased significantly over the past 15 years. This has implications for supervision, clinical and procedural experience, and availability of rotations. The College of Intensive Care Medicine of Australia and New Zealand (CICM) decided to estimate the current training resources using several domains.
Methods: An online survey was sent to all CICM trainees (n = 528) and all directors of intensive care units (ICUs) (n = 106), using the SurveyMonkey tool.
Results: The overall response rate for the survey was 44% (trainees, 38%; directors, 72%). Most trainees had a 1:1 day-night roster system. Experience among trainees with common ICU procedures appeared limited. Fifty-six per cent of trainees reported spending more than 20% of their time attending medical emergency team calls. Difficulty accessing anaesthesia, medicine, paediatric and rural terms were reported by 35%, 26% 46% and 40% of trainees, respectively. Thirty-seven percent of trainees reported having to wait at least 1 year and 10% waited up to 2 years over and above their required training time to secure an anaesthesia term. Owing to gaps in experience in certain modules, one-third of final-year trainees felt underprepared to take on a role as a specialist, an observation shared by 15% of directors.
Conclusion: This report has provided an assessment of the available resources within Australia and New Zealand for training doctors in intensive care medicine, and has identified significant limitations and concerns among trainees and ICU directors regarding the capacity to train. The findings call for a review of the training program, including a determination of optimal numbers of training positions.