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A GP fellowship plus a year of advanced skills. FACRRM is 4 years — 3 years core generalist training including 12 months in MMM4–7, then 12 months of AST 12. FRACGP-RG is also 4 years: 12 months hospital, 18 months GP, 6 months core emergency and 12 months ARST 3. From March 2027 the title is protected 4.
Two colleges, one destination. ACRRM's Fellowship is 4 years FTE: 3 years Core Generalist Training — 12 months primary care, 3 months emergency, 3 months secondary care and 12 months in MMM4–7, with demonstrated competency in anaesthetics, paediatrics and obstetrics — then at least 12 months of Advanced Specialised Training, 24 months if the AST is surgery 12. RACGP's rural fellowship, FRACGP-RG, is 4 years on top of the FRACGP core: 12 months hospital, 18 months general practice with at least 52 weeks in MMM3–7, 6 months core emergency medicine and 12 months of Additional Rural Skills Training in one of anaesthesia, obstetrics and women's health, emergency medicine, surgery, child health, adult internal medicine, mental health, palliative care, Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander health, small-town rural general practice or an academic post 3.
It is now a recognised specialty. Rural Generalist Medicine was approved as a new field of specialty practice in September 2025; from March 2027 "specialist Rural Generalist" is a protected title and appears on the national register 4.
The jobs sit in a separate, earlier lane. Queensland runs its own pathway with an RG intern stream and an AST campaign that opens in April, ahead of the main RMO round 5. NSW runs "Rural Generalist Trainee (General Practice)" as an early round in the JMO campaign — for the 2027 clinical year ads opened 4 May 2026 and closed 18 May, months before the general PGY2+ round 6. Miss the early round and you wait a year.
Single employer models now cover 315 salaried posts in every state except WA, keeping award pay, leave and super continuous across hospital and community terms — funded only to 31 December 2028 7.
The part the colleges don't tell you is that an AST is only as good as the roster attached to it, and that the skill you train is a rural skill. Both points are made below by people doing the job.
r/ausjdocs — community view, not policy; verbatim, cautionary beside positive where both exist, every quote linked to the comment.
I don't think you should think about going back to metro. Your clinical exposure and skill sets are made and trained for rural and remote community. There is very little room for RG to practice their AST in metro.
I'd strongly recommend doing your first year of community-based training first because you have better context for what using those skills will look like in practice.
If you do anaesthetics or obs AST you make hospital reg money equivalent to your year level.
The thing with the whole A(R)ST system is other than obstetrics and anaesthetics (and surgery but as you said they're like hens teeth unfortunately), most states haven't really figured out how to use them. So they end up being solutions in search of problems.
Asked 52 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 /rural generalist|\bRG\b (pathway|training|program)|advanced skill/i. Quotes are the highest-scoring first-hand accounts inside rural-generalist and AST threads, chosen so the practical sequencing advice sits next to the two warnings about what an AST actually buys you.