← all questions · Hospitals and rotations
Only where a college scores them, and then very precisely. RACS paediatric surgery pays 3 points per 10–12 week resident term and 6 points per six-month unaccredited registrar term 1; RACP wants 20 weeks of medicine 2; Queensland BPT gives clinical experience 5% of the score 3. Outside those lines, your referees carry more.
Where rotations are literally worth points. RACS paediatric surgery publishes the clearest schedule anywhere: a resident term in paediatric medicine or surgery scores 3 points per 10–12 weeks to a cap of 6, a registrar term in paediatrics, PICU or NICU scores 6 per six months, and an unaccredited registrar term in the specialty scores 6 per six months to a cap of 12 1. Terms shorter than 10 weeks are not scored at all 1. That is a rotation timetable, priced.
Where they are a gate rather than a score. RACP requires 20 weeks of medicine and DPE approval, and nothing about which subspecialty 2. ANZCA caps anaesthesia and ICU at 12 months of your two prevocational years 4. Queensland's adult BPT gives clinical experience only 5% of the total, against 60% for a six-station MMI 3 — the terms get you eligible, the interview decides.
What the sub says the terms are really for. Meeting the people who will write about you, and picking up the research the department already has running 5. The most useful first-hand answer in the corpus is a paediatrics trainee's: the term helps mostly because of the reference, and whether you get a good one depends on the time of year 5.
The counter-argument. People get onto O&G resident jobs with no O&G term, and onto Queensland BPT with half a term and no intern terms at all 5. A missing rotation usually costs a year of sequencing, not the career.
What to do with that. Chase the terms your target college names in writing, chase a consultant reference in each of them, and stop optimising the rest. No college publishes an offer rate split by which rotations applicants did — that comparison is not published.
r/ausjdocs — community view, not policy; verbatim, cautionary beside positive where both exist, every quote linked to the comment.
For competitive specialties like subspec surg, it might help with meeting department bosses and picking up research opportunities, but for medical Paeds, it shouldn't be a problem as far as I'm aware
I chose taking leave at my preferred time of year over an O&G rotation in internship (lol.. it was one or the other and I wanted to go on holiday!) and it didn't affect me getting a resident job in O&G at all despite no experience
QLD, some of my reg's last year got on PGY2 with a half-term (and no intern terms lol).
Doing paeds is helpful, especially if you're able to get a good reference from rotation (which is time of year dependent though). Not the end of the world if you don't
Asked 9 times on r/ausjdocs (title-regex count) · encoded by hand from the numbered sources, retrieved 12 Sept 2026; no AI wrote any of it. how the count was made
asked_count = posts in the r/ausjdocs dump (19,145 posts, 2022-09-13 to 2026-09-12) whose title matches /rotation.{0,45}(applicat|training|career|CV|matter|impact)|(training|applicat|CV).{0,35}rotation/i. Quotes are the highest-scoring comments in the rotations-and-applications thread, chosen so the two first-hand 'got on without the term' accounts sit beside the 'it helps because of the reference' account.