← all questions · IMGs and SIMGs
Registration first, then the same JMO campaign everyone else uses. Which registration pathway you qualify for — competent authority, standard, or specialist — is decided by the Medical Board, not by the hospital 12. Then you apply to state campaigns on their published dates 56. Section 19AB restricts Medicare billing for ten years 4.
Step one is the Medical Board, not a job ad. Ahpra and the Medical Board set which pathway you are on 1. If your qualification comes from a recognised competent authority — the GMC in the UK, the Medical Council of Ireland, the ECFMG in the US, or Canada — you apply for provisional registration, complete 12 months of supervised practice (minimum 47 weeks FTE), and then apply for general registration 2. If it doesn't, you are on the standard pathway: the AMC MCQ examination, then either the AMC clinical examination or a workplace-based assessment 3. Specialists are assessed separately by a college, or via the expedited specialist pathway where their qualification is on the Board's accepted list 1.
Step two is the ordinary recruitment machinery. There is no separate IMG job market for prevocational and resident posts. You apply into the state campaigns on the published dates — NSW's PGY2+ round opens in mid-July for the following clinical year and Queensland runs its RMO campaign from May 56. Regional and outer-metro services advertise more, fill later and supervise better than the tertiary centres people fixate on.
Step three is the bit nobody warns you about. Section 19AB of the Health Insurance Act 1973 requires overseas trained doctors and foreign graduates of accredited medical schools to work in a Distribution Priority Area (GPs) or District of Workforce Shortage (non-GP specialists) for ten years before they can bill Medicare freely; remoteness earns scaling credits that shorten it 4. As a salaried junior in a public hospital this does not bite. It decides where you can work the moment you fellow.
What the sub says, and it is worth hearing both halves. Junior doctors here see competent-authority arrivals as direct competition for metro jobs. Consultants in outer metro, regional and rural services say they advertise locally every year and cannot fill the posts. Both statements are in the corpus and neither has been refuted 7.
r/ausjdocs — community view, not policy; verbatim, cautionary beside positive where both exist, every quote linked to the comment.
junior docs from these countries could always come here via the Competent Authority pathway anyway (which is why they're competing for the junior metro positions).
Once you have met the requirements for competent authority apply to any of the state JMO recruitment programs and with a preference for emergency medicine you are very likely to obtain a metro or near metro spot.
there aren't enough local graduates who want to work in many places. Outer metro/regional/rural/ED/GP
You would not be eligible for the Competent Authority Pathway and therefore would have to complete AMC exams and rotation requirements
Asked 71 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 r_ausjdocs_posts.jsonl (19,145 posts, 2022-09-13 to 2026-09-12) whose title matches /(\bIMG\b|international medical graduate|overseas (trained |qualified )?(doctor|graduate|medical)).{0,60}(job|work|apply|register|pathway|move|australia|position|hire|employ)|(job|work|apply|register|pathway|move to).{0,45}(\bIMG\b|international medical graduate|overseas doctor)/i. Quotes are the highest-scoring comments that give procedural rather than political answers, with one comment from each side of the metro-competition argument so the disagreement is visible rather than smoothed over.