My Rural Story

On the second day, we fly from Weipa to the second community and we’ll do a clinic for the whole day and then at the end of that day, we fly back to Weipa. And then on the third day we fly from Weipa to the third community and fly back to Cairns at the end of it, and then we come home the day after.

Another thing that’s different is the investigations and the sorts of things that you can actually do. In a big urban hospital, you can send someone for scans and you can send someone for tests and you can send them for small procedures. But, when you’re actually making those decisions in a remote area you have to factor in: How far away is that test? Does that person have to fly to Cairns? Is that flight three hours? How much is that flight going to cost? And does this patient really need this or can we make do with something else? So, there’s a certain sense of compromise that you wouldn’t see in a larger tertiary hospital in a city. Another thing is the distribution of staff that you see. So, for some of these smaller communities it will actually be a small primary health care clinic and often there won’t be a single doctor in the actual clinic. So, you’ll have a mix of Indigenous Health Care Workers, Nurses, Nurse Practitioners, and other staff. You’ll also have a lot of specialists that fly in and fly out so they’ll just be there for the day, just like we are, in our specialist outreach team. I think that’s really different because you’ve really got that different team dynamic but it’s also smaller and a lot more friendly, so you get to know a lot of faces, you see people regularly. Sometimes with the fly in - fly out, you actually fly into one community with a group and then see them two days later at a different community, so it is quite fun and you do end up on a similar circuit.

What is different about working in rural and remote areas?

The first thing would be that you’re really working under a strict time frame. Not to say that things aren’t busy in urban hospitals, they definitely are, but in remote areas, when you’re flying in and flying out of a community, you have to be finished by a particular time at the end of the day so you can fly out. So there is that time pressure to make sure that you’ve seen the children, because most of our patients are children, and have everything done within that time frame. So, I think that is quite different.

‘If you want to see the social determinants of health in practice then going to a remote Indigenous community is a really great thing to do.’

@ElsevierAUS