My Rural Story

do a good history because 80% of your diagnosing can be done from a history if you do it well. They’d be the three big things I’d tell a student going rurally. What has been one of your best experiences working in these remote communities? The best experience I’ve had in a rural setting is when I worked as a student on placement with a GP at St George. St George is a small town six hours from Brisbane and I was lucky to work with a GP who had worked in the town for 40 years. The best part of working with her was that I got to see how she approached her patients and their care. As an example, a patient came to see her who had amental health issue. Shewas not just able to treat that personwithwhat they toldher intheactual interview, shewas able to treat them from a holistic point of view. She knew their mother, their father, their brothers their sisters, and she was able to globally, in a way, look after this patient. And it just astounds me at the end of the day that we saw about 20 patients, every single patient had a different issue - there was not one issue that was repeated. So people who say when you go rural you only do the same thing over and over, they’re definitely wrong. Every patient we saw was different, but every patient we saw, she knew their background. She knew, they’re the teacher that worked at such and such and it’s been really tough

down at the school lately so that’s probably why she’s come to us with that problem.

The biggest advantages I see for living in a rural area would be the fact that you’re part of a community. That sense of close-knit community, that’s a big draw card for me . That ability to have the knowledge of how to treat her patient better and how to look after her patient, the ability to holistically look after them and the continuity of care that you could see she had for all of her patients. That was a big wow moment for me, that’s what really cemented my idea of being a rural GP because, you just can’t do that in the city and so that was a really big moment for me. What have you experienced in remote Australia that has changed your world view? Something that really changed my world view was when I was on placement in a little island called Elcho Island. It’s a little island off the top coast of Australia, about a two hours flight from Darwin. It’s a community of about two and a half thousand Aboriginal people and when

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