The thing about finding reliable information about medical and health related topics, is knowing whether you can trust the source it comes from. And to trust, you need to know a bit about who it is offering the advice.
So here's a little about my journey to becoming a rural General Practitioner in Manjimup.
I grew up in regional areas, mainly Collie, which is where I attended high school. My grades were good, but I wasn't entirely sure what direction I wanted to take. My initial thought had been engineering, but I decided to put medicine down first and let the final results dictate what direction I took next. Not exactly the glamourous "I always knew I wanted to make people better" story, right? But I'm not sure how many 17 year olds really know themselves enough to have it all mapped out by Yr 12 exams...
I didn't know much about medical specialities in the early days. My experience had always been your country GP was the one stop shop, you went to see them and they worked out how to make you better Like many young uni students, once I got through the first painstaking year, I found my chosen field had a huge number of roads to take, but the generalist path continued to sit most comfortably with me. I liked, and still do, the puzzle like nature of being a GP.
This was solidified when I chose to undertake a Rural Clinical School year. I was reminded of those country GP's who had a breadth of knowledge and experience, who saw the overall picture of a person's health and how good healthcare access was a foundation for so many other parts of a regional community. I was hooked. I continued my intern and resident years in Bunbury and Busselton hospitals, before moving into a GP registrar role in Collie, then Narrogin and finally Manjimup where I met my wife and we are raising our family.
I am incredibly passionate about rural medicine. I have the opportunity to be involved in long term care in a private practice, manage acute care and emergencies through the public hospital system and train the future rural GP's as a senior lecturer for the Rural Clinical School campus based in the Warren Blackwood region. I get to be a part of a life long healthcare journey for patients, and often multiple generations of the same family. Transactional doctoring (let's come back to that one another day...) is no place for me. Without doubt, I'll take the relationship building nature of being a rural GP every day.
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