19AB<\/a>\u00a0[the moratorium legislation],\u2019 he said.<\/p>\n\u2018But when they become owners, they\u2019re in charge \u2013 and people want to be in charge of their own destinies.\u2019<\/p>\n
By contrast, IMGs working in corporate practices tend to head to the city once their moratorium is over, according to Mr Barns.<\/p>\n
Of the 900 GPs in Tasmania, around 40% first trained overseas, with the proportion rising the further you go from Hobart. Some areas are almost totally reliant on overseas-trained GPs.<\/p>\n
Mr Barns said another key factor for people staying rural after their moratorium period is whether there were other people from their home country living in the area.<\/p>\n
\u2018Whether from Africa, the Middle East or New Zealand, if you have a cohort of people, or are able to build up a community of people, you stay,\u2019 he explained.<\/p>\n
\u2018It used to be every practice was owned by Australian-born or British expatriates. Now practices on the north-west coast are 85% owned by people who were subject to the moratorium at some stage.<\/p>\n
\u2018People do stay if they put down roots, professionally and personally.<\/p>\n
\u2018It can be bewildering, but probably more for the country town than for the doctor. Most doctors have worked internationally before coming here \u2013 say, Nigeria to Barbados to the US to Tasmania \u2013 and may have lots more multicultural experience than their 96-year-old patients.\u2019<\/p>\n
Finding employment for partners and good schools for children, Mr Barns said, is also a key factor.<\/p>\n
\u2018The kids of many IMGs are now doing medicine at the University of Tasmania, so that will be an interesting factor \u2013 seeing what the next generation will do,\u2019 he said.<\/p>\n
The only GP for miles<\/strong>
\nDr Michael Livingston likes to tell people he is the only permanent doctor between Esperance and Albany, on the south coast of Western Australia.<\/p>\nThe Glasgow-born GP told\u00a0newsGP<\/em>\u00a0he decided to try Australia after a \u2018bad day at work\u2019 in England.<\/p>\n\u2018I thought it was time for a life change,\u2019 he said.<\/p>\n
\u2018What\u2019s the worst that can happen? So I came with my wife in 2013 with two suitcases.\u2019<\/p>\n
Scottish-born GP Dr Michael Livingston has carved out his own niche in rural Western Australia.<\/em><\/p>\nDr Livingston began in Mandurah, on the south-west WA coast, and worked in Gunnedah in New South Wales before spotting an opportunity in Ravensthorpe, 500 km south-east of Perth, where he has been for five years.<\/p>\n
After taking over the practice, Dr Livingston has settled into rural life. In fact, he loves it.<\/p>\n
While his area may seem remote, it has three large mines nearby, as well as traffic between Perth and Esperance.<\/p>\n
That means a constant stream of challenging and interesting cases, ranging from occupational medicine to road trauma to snakebite to farming injuries.<\/p>\n
\u2018Diabetes, auto-immune disease, iron infusions, appendicitis, gall bladder, bowel cancers on ultrasound, a skin cancer list twice a week, GP services, ultrasounds, obstetrics, amputated fingers \u2013 bloody well everything,\u2019 Dr Livingston said.<\/p>\n
\u2018The scope and the expectations are massive. The next shire along hasn\u2019t had a permanent doctor in years.<\/p>\n
\u2018GPs can be devalued and negatively viewed by the public as a referral machine, but the patients I\u2019ve picked up, with a plethora of diagnoses from mental health to autoimmune disease, they haven\u2019t had to go see the super-specialists [immediately]. They can be investigated here and have the initial management here.<\/p>\n
\u2018There are a thousand ways I could leave and get paid more, with more time off. But if you can make a difference, that makes you feel good as well.<\/p>\n
\u2018You think you\u2019re not going to last two minutes, but if you don\u2019t let the job destroy you and start getting good outcomes, it becomes quite enjoyable. You can go from saying, I don\u2019t like the bush to, actually, I can do something.\u2019<\/p>\n
Dr Livingston, like other IMGs, believes having his own practice makes a big difference. That work, too, has been rewarded, with his practice recently taking out a local community service award.<\/p>\n
\u2018You own your own space and can change it,\u2019 he said.<\/p>\n
That helicopter job<\/strong>
\nLiving overseas was normal for Dr Sara Fergusson, with stints of her early life in Scotland, Fiji and Canada.<\/p>\n\u2018The world wasn\u2019t so foreign,\u2019 she told\u00a0newsGP<\/em>.<\/p>\nDr Fergusson\u2019s first taste of Australia came during medical school, when she did an elective in the Willowra community north-west of Alice Springs.<\/p>\n
But what hooked her on rural life, funnily enough, was when she moved to Australia and found herself doing paediatric retrievals from Westmead Hospital in Sydney.<\/p>\n
\u2018I was a girl from Scotland who came to Australia and found myself in this job flying across the countryside of New South Wales,\u2019 she said. \u2018We did amazing retrievals with lots of neonatals, so I decided I wanted to have a career in rural medicine.<\/p>\n
\u2018Right from the beginning, that helicopter job, the rural hospital, picking up sick children, that\u2019s when I realised I wanted to work as a rural GP, and I didn\u2019t need the moratorium to do that.\u2019<\/p>\n
After Sydney came the Northern Territory, where she worked in the emergency department in Tennant Creek, and later the Blue Mountains.<\/p>\n
Then came general practice training, followed by work in Mudgee and Broken Hill.<\/p>\n
\u2018I love hospital work, but I wanted to know my patients and know the community,\u2019 she said.<\/p>\n
Dr Fergusson can still remember the first time a patient brought her a dozen eggs from his chooks.<\/p>\n
\u2018That was beautiful,\u2019 she said. \u2018And I remember my first home visit \u2013 an incredible experience.<\/p>\n
\u2018The life of a country GP made me really content.\u2019<\/p>\n
Local friends invited her to a picnic, where she met her future husband, a Mudgee boy who had moved to the city and was back on a visit. They eventually took over her husband\u2019s family farm near Mudgee, north-west of Sydney, where they raised two children.<\/p>\n
Rural life has given Dr Fergusson the opportunity to pursue many different professional interests, such as rural locum work in the Northern Territory, work as a psychiatry registrar, a growing interest in occupational medicine, opioid prescribing for a corrections centre, an academic post in Broken Hill, and work as a Remote Vocational Training Scheme (RVTS) supervisor and Practice Experience Program (PEP) mentor.<\/p>\n
\u2018You get these opportunities, lots of them, to continue training and to take on more skills,\u2019 she said.<\/p>\n
\u2018The main message I have is that I love rural and remote medical practice in Australia.\u2019<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
Please click on this link<\/a> to view the original article.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"For international medical graduates (IMGs) settling in Australia, there is a major hurdle to jump: the Federal Government\u2019s moratorium, which requires living and working in rural or remote areas for up to 10 years. As Australia wrestles with persistent doctor shortages outside major cities,\u00a0newsGP\u00a0talks to three overseas-trained GPs who stayed on. Practice principal For Dr…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":13,"featured_media":4846,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_seopress_robots_primary_cat":"none","footnotes":""},"categories":[52,39],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-4845","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-general-information","category-news"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.jpsmedical.com.au\/af-api\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4845","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.jpsmedical.com.au\/af-api\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.jpsmedical.com.au\/af-api\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.jpsmedical.com.au\/af-api\/wp\/v2\/users\/13"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.jpsmedical.com.au\/af-api\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=4845"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.jpsmedical.com.au\/af-api\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4845\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":7884,"href":"https:\/\/www.jpsmedical.com.au\/af-api\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4845\/revisions\/7884"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.jpsmedical.com.au\/af-api\/wp\/v2\/media\/4846"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.jpsmedical.com.au\/af-api\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=4845"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.jpsmedical.com.au\/af-api\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=4845"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.jpsmedical.com.au\/af-api\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=4845"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}