I think they had another website similar to this one before but this allows you to compare specialties. Looks slightly better and gives you trainee numbers too which weren't provided before. The trainee numbers should be divided by the number of years required for training to give you the intake of specialists per year, this is on average but will vary year to year.
As you can see most specialties are oversubscribed as I've stated earlier.
Also the number of hours worked I feel is understated as you will be oncall and will be rostered for overtime when training. Also don't forget your other commitments in research, education etc. if you are involved.
http://www.mapmycareer.health.nsw.gov.au/Pages/Compare.aspx
While this is a fun tool to use and reflects some general ideas about the specialist workforce, I think that there are a few important points to note:
The hours are an average of full-time and part-time in public and private practice, which as Medman implies will not be reflective at all of work during training. However, it also may not be reflective of work as a consultant. It provides limited information as it does not give how much is earned for those hours worked (ie how much does one need to work to maintain the cost of living).
The way the site has defined oversubscribed vs undersubscribed is on an applications vs training positions basis. In other words, this doesn't indicate whether there are or are not jobs after training and doesn't tell us anything about the workforce. It may be that so-called undersubscribed specialities such as ED might be oversubscribed after training, or oversubscribed specialities such as ophthalmology might be undersubscribed after training.
Additionally, the website doesn't demonstrate the degree of oversubscription, ie one specialty might have 1000 rejected applicants, while another may have only 10 rejected applicants. Applying for a specialty is like applying for a job (which hospital-based medical officers need to do yearly anyway)--like any other discipline, you can expect to be rejected a lot. The difference is that there is always some resident-type job lying around for you (some that pay ungodly amounts) to take up. In any case, some junior doctors give up pursuing a specialty and take the path of practicality by applying for less competitive training programs.
As a whole, the website offers limited insight for medical students and interns in deciding how hard they need to work to get into a training program, but offers no insight as to what happens afterwards.
