Currently, patients in his Rusden Street clinic are having to wait up to four weeks before they can get a routine check-up.

It is a similar or worse situation in other nearby clinics, Dr Martin said.

"But the policy change will completely bust some towns where doctors in remote RA3 or RA4 areas now have just about no chance of hiring or finding a fill-in GP," he said.

"So patients will have to travel a couple of hundred kilometres for care or will just have no doctor at all."

In July, the federal government announced changes to the Distribution Priority Areas (DPA), which had previously made it mandatory for Overseas Trained Doctors (OTD) and some medical graduates to do their time in remote or rural areas before they could work in the cities.

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Now, OTDs are able to immediately relocate to large regional centres and some outer metropolitan areas.

Dr Martin said DPA changes should have been delayed until there was a clear sign the doctor shortfall in rural and regional areas had been reversed.

Dr Martin, also a senior lecturer in medicine at the University of New England, believes all medical graduates should be made to work in rural, regional and remote areas as part of their rotational duties.

"Because it is going to be even harder to get new doctors to move away from the city and entice overseas trained doctors to come and support services that are aching here," he said.

He also suggested lowering financial incentives for locums who can earn thousands of dollars a day before entering a training pathway, such as general practice where the nation has a dire need.

"The inner suburbs of Sydney, Newcastle, Melbourne and Brisbane don't need a whole bunch more doctors walking out the door at three o'clock in the afternoon when their rural colleagues are still back at work," he said.

"We've got specialists out here burning out, having to leave early or dying young.

"There's plenty of people in the system but they're just not distributed properly," he said.

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