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involved. It was then that I realised how
little I knew and how much I had to learn.
That changed my life course in many
ways. I’ve worked for the college of
GPs for four years down in Melbourne
and wrote their Aboriginal curriculum
and have been really involved in that
ever since. I also an my own consulting
business for seven years but now I’m
working at Bond University as a Professor
of Innovations in Medical Education.
What is different about
working in rural and
remote areas?
There are two main things. One’s about
the content, the sorts of things everybody
does to work as a doctor or a nurse or
an allied health professional in a rural or
remote or urban area and the other one
is about the context. The context changes
everything about a normal situation. It’s a
bit like doing a pap smear in Melbourne
on a patient or doing one in a remote
community. In a remote community
that person might be your next door
neighbour, your kid’s best friend’s
mother, those sorts of things. So, it’s a very
different context and the context changes
everything about a normal situation.
Rural and remote people see the world
and know the world in different ways
to metropolitan people. They are often
more resourceful in terms of access
to services, how they actually go about
their daily living, those sorts of things.
Distance isn’t seen as a problem, ‘oh,
it’s only four hours drive down the road
mate, it’ll be right’, that sort of attitude.
That’s quite acceptable and they’re used
to not having the same sort of facilities
and access to services as metropolitan
people have. I think as a rural person,
I never thought that I was any different
from a metropolitan person, I thought