Once upon a time … you could weave a GP into the storyline of your family history.
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The telling of milestone moments, a pregnancy, a birth, a disease diagnosis, grappling with grief, dealing with depression – they were events shared in an intimate doctor-patient relationship. Individuals would become couples, who would become families, and all would trust their medical care to their GP because they felt safe in a relationship nurtured over time and often, generations.
The career of Dr Colin Rose OAM gifts insight into the importance of a GP to community. Former patients are celebrating his career but mourning the loss of his medical counsel after 47 years. Dr Rose depicts the Taree community as “one big family”, and accordingly, that ‘family’ offers abundant praise with the words of Debbie Ward typical of comments - “Compassionate, empathetic, kind and true. We only meet this kind of person once in a lifetime (if we are lucky). How lucky our community got this doctor and gentleman, we are certainly all going to miss him.”
The retirement of Dr Rose is a blow to general medicine services in Taree and surrounding areas. We need GPs. Desperately. We need GPs to stay. Definitely.
Alarmingly Taree is again classified as “an area of Australia in which the population’s need for medical services has not been met”, according to the Department of Health. Government knows there is a problem and sees overseas-trained GP recruitment as the solution. It’s a band-aid on a gaping wound that fails to deal with the cause – Australian-trained doctors do not want to work or live in rural Australia.
We want Australian-trained GPs, we want appointments in a reasonable time frame and we want doctors who want to be here. My first question to a new GP is “how long will you be here?”, and the answer is never more than a year. Our communication is clinical, not personal as there is no point in investing in the relationship – there is no Dr Rose GP experience in my life story, but I believe there should be. My choice to live in the Manning should not mean I must accept a revolving door of overseas-trained doctors or young doctors doing registrar training.
Once upon a time … Australian-trained doctors came to our area and they stayed. Politicians and GPs must unite to fix the system because we need a ‘happily-ever-after’ ending to this community health story.
