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ACEM
When Emergency Medicine applications run, and what the round looks like.
Applications
Round 1 opens. A Special Consideration request to vary an eligibility requirement must be lodged before this date.
Minimum PGY3 at application, with at least 6 months FTE in a single emergency department and three separate 8-week non-ED placements. Emergency medicine rotations from PGY1 are beneficial.
Training positions and workforce figures below are limited to New South Wales. Selection criteria, requirements and application dates are set by ACEM nationally and apply in every state.
High
How Emergency Medicine training is structured.
First 12 FTE months
To complete
The balance of the program
To complete
ACEM Primary Examination
Cannot be sat before FACEM training commences. Successful applicants may apply to sit it at the start of the medical training year they enrol for.
Training Stage 1
Online modules
Indigenous Health and Cultural Competence, Assessing Cultural Competence, Critical Care Airway Management, and ACEM Core Values.
Training Stage 1
Fellowship Examination
Required for Fellowship
Largely concurrent with FACEM training
Enrol from Training Stage Two onward, or as a Fellow. The adult and mixed emergency medicine time, the paediatric emergency medicine time, and the general paediatric and paediatric intensive care placements can each be certified towards core FACEM stage requirements at the same time.
Entry gates that are not scored, such as a visa, residency status, or the type of medical registration required.
One set of categories across every specialty, so two can be compared. Only those with criteria recorded for this specialty are shown.
Rotations, logbooks, procedures, and exposure
Rural, regional, and remote experience
Selection points and pathways for Aboriginal, Torres Strait Islander, and Māori applicants
Papers, impact factor, audits, and QI
Who is asked to report on you, and what they are asked
How the application is marked and weighted
Registration mechanics and logistics not covered above
Sourced from Australian medical community discussion.
Before applying
At application
POCUS (point-of-care ultrasound) certification (e.g. FAMUS or equivalent) is increasingly expected and valued in the CV.
Regional and rural ED rotations provide high-acuity, high-autonomy experience, and are less competitive positions for trainees.
A single Paediatric ED placement meets the 6-month ED eligibility requirement. No type of ED is specified for the required full ED term (ACEM policy P809 FAQ).
You have a maximum of 3 attempts at ACEM selection, so apply when your CV is genuinely competitive.
A non-refundable Selection into Training fee is payable to begin your application.
Advanced Life Support (ALS2) and EMST/ETM certification are training requirements you complete once you are in the program, not something you need before applying. Neither appears in the selection policy.
Selection and workforce history, transcribed as published.
3,799
Fellows in Australia
At 31 December 2025
219 to 431
FACEM growth, WA
ACEM dashboard, 2015 to 2025
A large and geographically even specialty: 3,799 Fellows at the end of 2025, and the deepest reach into the Northern Territory (62) of any specialty on this site outside general practice. ACEM also publishes an eleven-year jurisdictional trend, which shows how fast that growth has been — Western Australia has almost doubled its FACEMs since 2015 and Tasmania has more than doubled.
How many Fellows of this specialty were on the register in each state at 31 December 2025. This is workforce size, not intake — a large number here does not mean a large number of training places.
| Jurisdiction | Fellows |
|---|---|
| Australian Capital Territory | 76 |
| New South Wales (your selected state) |
Queensland Health is the only state department publishing these figures so far.
No published figures exist yet for New South Wales. This is being worked on. The selection criteria and requirements above apply Australia wide regardless of state. See the Queensland figures.
Changes published by ACEM.
ACEM selection rounds for 2026: Round 1 closes 2 June 2026, Round 2 closes 1 September 2026. Maximum 3 lifetime attempts at selection.
53 posts across 42 hospitals in New South Wales. Each circle counts hospitals.
The Tweed Valley Hospital, Albury Wodonga Health are not shown on the map, with no location on file. Their posts are still counted above.
Show these kinds of site
Select a region to see the hospitals inside it. A numbered circle is several too close to draw apart, so open it to zoom in.
Hospital locations © OpenStreetMap contributors. State boundaries from the Australian Bureau of Statistics.
Published by ACEM and the Medical Board unless stated.
Colleges, portals and rubrics
Within Emergency Medicine
A dot marks a field with its own page. The rest inherit this one.
Connected to this specialty by the Medical Board’s specialty structure, by college, or by a shared training pathway.
Requirements, windows, and criteria change annually. Verify with ACEM before making career decisions. Report an error on this page.
| Northern Territory | 62 |
|---|
| Queensland | 937 |
|---|
| South Australia | 218 |
|---|
| Tasmania | 103 |
|---|
| Victoria | 929 |
|---|
| Western Australia | 431 |
|---|
| Australia, total | 3,799 |
|---|
From ACEM's "Australian jurisdictional trends in FACEMs and FACEM trainees" dashboard. Only the three jurisdictions whose plotted series can be told apart with certainty are shown — see the footnotes.
| Year | WA | SA | TAS |
|---|---|---|---|
| 2015 | 219 | 119 | 49 |
| 2016 | 226 | 117 | 46 |
| 2017 | 245 | 129 | 50 |
| 2018 | 257 | 141 | 55 |
| 2019 | 284 | 146 | 64 |
| 2020 | 293 | 155 | 65 |
| 2021 | 317 | 167 | 74 |
| 2022 | 334 | 183 | 83 |
| 2023 | 366 | 190 | 90 |
| 2024 | 392 | 196 | 95 |
| 2025 | 431 | 218 | 103 |
Source: Australian Government Department of Health. Medical Education and Training (2025), Chapter 4: Fellows — College Fellows by state, as at 31 December 2025. The eleven-year trend below is from the Australasian College for Emergency Medicine's own jurisdictional dashboard, captured in the same supplied compilation. Figures are transcribed as published.