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You don't apply to ANZCA — you get hired. The college floor is general registration plus two years' general hospital experience, at most 12 months of it anaesthesia or ICU 1. A department or state scheme then appoints you and you register afterwards 1. Apply June–July of your feeder year for the 2027 clinical year 34.
The official mechanism. ANZCA does not select. Its own words: the college sets eligibility, employers appoint. You need general (not provisional) registration and two years of general hospital experience post-graduation, of which at most 12 months may be anaesthesia or ICU 1. You become a college applicant after 52 weeks of clinical experience; trainee registration only follows once you hold an accredited post 2. There is no pre-entry exam — the Primary cannot be sat until you are a registered trainee 1. Fees for 2026: application $895, trainee registration $2,905 1.
So the selection event is a job. Either a state rotational scheme post — VATS, QARTS, SANTRATS, WARATP, TATP, ACT, or a NSW network — or an independent 6–24 month accredited post 1. For the 2026 campaign covering the 2027 clinical year: VATS opened 1 June and closed 3 July with references due 8 July, interviews 24–26 August and match results by 4 September 3. QARTS ran 1–29 June with two referee reports emailed direct to the college 4. NSW's Critical Care stream advertised 22 June, closed 6 July, offers from 29 July 5.
What is actually scored. No scheme publishes a rubric — VIC is CV plus three referees with each program shortlisting independently; WA uses interviews, simulation and a presentation; NSW is written criteria, CV, panel interview and referee reports 36. No points for a masters, no published publication cap, no attempt cap from the college 1. Which is why the community answer is about people, not paper.
The community view. Referees with clout beat course counts; the described panel process turns on a member vouching for you 7. A crit-care SRMO year is the audition, and ICU registrar jobs with guaranteed anaesthetic time are the favoured move after a miss 8. Counter-example worth publishing: a trainee who got on with no audits and no research 9.
Not published: applicant-to-place ratios anywhere except Queensland.
r/ausjdocs — community view, not policy; verbatim, cautionary beside positive where both exist, every quote linked to the comment.
most of the CV's look the same on paper, it's who you know, if you don't get an independent year, you rotate through unaccredited land desperately hoping to land a job with the right exposure to the right consultants at the right time.
I didn't really do any audits, no research at all. Just BASIC in pgy2.
Do triathlons. They love that. Wish I was joking.
I will always favour doing an ICU reg job with guaranteed anaesthetic time
if a panel member vouches for that candidate themselves or has been told that candidate is strong for reasons x,y,z by a trusted peer
Asked 64 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 /(?=.*(anaesth|anesth))(?=.*(get(ting)? (on|onto|into)|\bapply\b|applic|applying|selection|pathway|how (do|to)|\bSRMO\b|crit(ical)? care|training program))/i. Quotes are the highest-scoring comments inside anaesthetics pathway threads, balanced so the 'it's who you know' account and the panel-vouching description sit beside a trainee who got on with no research at all.