← all questions · Hospitals and rotations
Stay if the next job you want is inside this employer, move if it is not. NSW's two-year JMO contract is a retention device, not a lock — PGY2 positions are re-advertised in the same statewide campaign 1. Victoria runs a whole PGY2 match for exactly this move 2. The cost of moving is your rotation allocation.
You are allowed to move, everywhere. NSW advertises the majority of vocational and non-vocational positions for the next clinical year in one statewide campaign — main round 14 July to 4 August 2026 for the 2027 year — and RMO posts are in it, so leaving after PGY1 is an ordinary application, not a special case 1. Victoria goes further and runs a statewide PGY2 Match: applications 27 July to 21 August 2026, results 23 September 2026 2. Queensland's RMO & Registrar Campaign takes JHO, SHO, PHO and registrar applications in the same June window regardless of where you currently work 3.
What staying actually buys. Access to the internal round. Victorian health services make pre-match offers to their own interns before the statewide match opens, so the jobs visible externally are the leftovers 2. In NSW the networked programs run on the same logic — the panel already knows you 1.
What it costs. Rotation allocation is done for the people already on the books, so an external PGY2 tends to get what is left over 4. And the reference you build over two years with one department is worth more than three polite ones from three.
The counter-argument, which the sub makes well. One health network is one way of doing things, and people who never leave stop being able to imagine any other 5. Moving early is cheap; moving as a senior registrar is not.
The decision rule. If your target program preferences internally, stay and make your intentions loud. If it does not — most physician networks tie into tertiary centres either way — take the job with better terms, better references and a shorter drive 5.
No state publishes what fraction of PGY2 jobs go to internal applicants. That figure is not published.
r/ausjdocs — community view, not policy; verbatim, cautionary beside positive where both exist, every quote linked to the comment.
As someone who did just that I found minimal benefit. If I had a do over I would have just stayed. It is far better to have a good community of junior doctors around you, good references, good worklife balance IMO.
My biggest bug bear is coming across other doctors and nurses who can't seem to comprehend the possibility that something can be done in other ways. Purely because they've only ever worked in one health network their whole career.
Depends on specialty aspirations and the relevant training pathway application requirements/considerations.
even if you get offered a PGY2 job you might be less likely to get rotations you want compared to people who were there from start of PGY1
Asked 13 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 /stay.{0,40}(same|current) hospital|branch out|move hospital|switch hospital|chang(e|ing) hospital/i. Quotes are the highest-scoring comments in the stay-or-move threads, picked so the 'I regret moving' and 'people who never move stop thinking' positions both appear.