My Rural Story

I knew very early on that I wanted to be working in community medicine. I loved getting out of the hospital context, around health promotion, disease prevention and particularly trying to make some in roads around Aboriginal, Torres Strait Islander health outcomes. So I completed my hospital bare minimum and got straight out into general practice. Just before I finished my fellowship training I moved back to Mackay and worked at the Aboriginal medical centre where I was for the last six years, working with my own community. That was really inspirational, working with your own family and cousins and relatives and seeing them as patients. That’s something that can happen working in rural and remote, you can’t have that professional divide.

‘It’s the environment, it’s the people and I think it’s the journey on the way to the patient. It’s not just about the patient and the medicine, it’s everything wrapped around it.’

was really, really inspirational for me to do that and stay connected, being in North Queensland, and I’d get to play football as well which was also important. Finishing that degree, I moved to Brisbane, I actually moved to the Gold Coast first to complete my internship, then went to Rural Brisbane Hospital.

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