AMA VICDOC Winter 2025 - Magazine - Page 23
WHAT KINDS OF POSITIVE CHANGES HAVE
YOU BEEN ABLE TO MAKE IN ECHUCA?
HAVE YOU ALWAYS WANTED
TO BE A DOCTOR?
I became very aware of disparities in
access to healthcare and health outcomes
as ACEM President. I made the decision
that I couldn’t just talk the talk; I had to
walk the walk. Talking about inequalities
in rural healthcare while working in a
tertiary hospital in Melbourne wasn’t
exactly walking the walk, so I decided
to get up and go – to go and make
a difference. When I first arrived in
Echuca, it was already a great hospital
with fantastic staff, but they were underresourced and struggling. There was no
ED director. There was no director of
anaesthetics or internal medicine. The
hospital was struggling to attract and
retain senior staff and overly reliant on
locums. The junior staff were working
incredibly hard but were stressed and
worried about something going wrong.
In the beginning, I spent quite a lot of
time sleeping at the hospital so I could
be there for them if they needed someone
senior. The pressures of population
growth meant we needed to build a stable
team. We’ve done that – we’ve now got
directors of all those units, very good
senior staff and great junior doctors or
DiTs who come up from the Austin
and other places.
Yes, pretty much. My grandfather, Henry
Judkins, was a GP. He worked out of the
Box Hill area and had links with Box
Hill Hospital. He was also an AMA
Victoria President in 1960, though back
then it was called the British Medical
Association (Victorian Branch) and the
Medical Society of Victoria. He was a
person that I really looked up to. He
looked after his community and worked
very hard and had some amazing stories
about trips doing missionary work
in Papua New Guinea. What he did
and the way he did it really inspired me
to look at medicine. And then, I was
very fortunate to fall into emergency
medicine. I remember the first time I did
an ED rotation, and thinking: this is my
tribe. I really enjoy the team effort in an
emergency care environment. I developed
a real connection with that dynamic,
so decided to pursue that as a career.
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