Meeting in Wagga on Wednesday, a coalition of health professionals and representatives of local government areas discussed possible solutions to the resourcing problem.

"I've been in Gundagai now for 37 years, I founded the Rural Doctors Association of Australia," said Dr Paul Mara.

"When I look in the mirror each morning, I think, 'we've had 37 years of failure, so what do we do now?

"I see the communities, I see the energy and the time going into keeping doctors, but quite simply it isn't working."

Attempts to increase doctor numbers in the bush by importing from overseas or borrowing from larger cities, Dr Mara said, have failed.

Though the lack of doctors in regional areas is not emblematic of a nationwide shortage, with trained doctors now representing 3.7 out of every thousand in the general population.

"Australia has more doctors than practically anywhere else in the world, but yet we're struggling," Dr Mara said.

"We have doubled our medical graduates in the last 15 years, and we're bringing thousands in from overseas. But why aren't they where we need them to be?"

Instead, Dr Mara believes it has been a problem of persuasion, and attracting only short-term tree-changers.

"Simply put, what we've been doing is not working so it's time to change tactic," Dr Mara said.

Since 2004, Dr Mara has been tracking the downturn in his profession but says the situation has become particularly dire in the past several years.

Estimating the loss of more than 50 doctors from Riverina towns in the past six months, Dr Mara has described the circumstance as "beyond critical".

He also estimates that in the past 12 months, only two towns - Temora and Young - have avoided being placed on bypass due to a shortage of on-call doctors.

"It's exacerbated by the lack of appropriate training that will keep rural professionals," he said.

"In 2004, one in five practices [in the Riverina] were not viable long-term, now it's becoming about one in two. The workload was extreme even then. Now it's gotten worse."

Dr Mara has now joined forces with Temora GP, Dr Rachel Christmas, in the hopes of stopping the bleed of rural doctors.

Together, they are calling on all levels of government to support a restructuring of the regional health training system.

In particular, Dr Mara is looking to re-adjust the city-centric ratio that governs how many patients a doctor can handle.

"The ratio is one doctor to 750 patients, we believe it should be significantly less.

"The reason being, when you're on call now, there's a lot more work. It's not sustainable, even when I was starting out in Gundagai, I was out of bed four nights out of five [when on call]."

Together, Dr Mara and Dr Christmas have devised a system that will identify potentially long-serving rural talent while still at universities, and foster their practice beyond graduation.

Recruited by the Murrumbidgee Local Health District, students in the program will involve a supervised terms in a rural practice and hospital beginning from the second year of study.

At the end of the fifth year, the completion of exams will result in the graduate being awarded the title of Fellow in Rural Medicine.

The trajectory is familiar from Dr Christmas's own career, who describes herself as a "homegrown GP".

"Temora is my hometown, so I guess I'm one of the success stories of the idea that if you invest in rural doctors, they will return to the bush and stay there," she said.