Drs Clare and David Walker’s story

LONGREACH

Single-practice model delivers in the west

Drs Clare and David Walker’s story

Things came full circle for GP supervisors Dr Clare and Dr David Walker this year when JCU medical graduates Dr Tom Currie and Dr Samantha Campbell returned to Longreach as rural generalist trainees.

“It’s the first time in our careers that we’ve mentored students who became junior doctors who have done their training at the bigger facilities and returned to work with us. It’s really nice,” says Clare, a former Rural Doctors Association of Queensland president.

The Walkers are helping to shape medical services in Central West Queensland, David as Executive Director of Medical Services for Central West Hospital and Health Service (CWHHS), and Clare as a board member. The couple did their junior doctor training in Cairns and on the Tablelands, settling in Longreach with one-year-old daughter Elsie after trying Outback life as GP registrars. “We did one year of GP training in Longreach in 2006 as a bit of a test run to see if we liked it, knowing we still had to do some advanced skills training, but with a plan that we would eventually come back here,” Clare says. “We really liked the work and the community. We returned to Cairns to do our respective advanced skills training – David did mental health as his advanced skill, and I did obstetrics and anaesthetics. We travelled for a little bit and returned to Longreach in 2010. We’ve been here ever since.”

As their professional roles have grown, so, too, has their family – Elsie is now in Year 8 at boarding school, and has three siblings, Oscar, 10, Maeve, 8, and Arthur, 5. “Longreach is a great community and a good place to raise a family,” Clare says. “This town is very agriculturally orientated so there is a very stable long-term population.” Operating under an innovative model of care called the CWHHS single-practice model, the hospital and health service employs salaried Senior Medical Officers who provide primary care at a privately owned GP clinic during the day and share the hospital after-hours call load. “It solved a couple of problems,” Clare says. “Medicare billings in general practice are just not fit-for-purpose in remote areas. You can’t attract and retain doctors for the salaries that they would earn through Medicare billing alone in most remote areas. There are a lot of areas in remote Queensland and, more broadly, a lot of remote areas across Australia where there are just no GPs anymore. So, if this is the model that works and we can recruit to it easily and allow the patients to have access to GPs, it’s certainly one of the models that should be looked at more broadly. “In this town, there’s that appreciation that even during a day when you’re at the general practice, looking after patients, you might have to leave with a minute’s notice to attend a delivery or respond to an emergency and then come back. You’re on call and you are providing the higher level of care that’s required in remote areas.” While most of David’s time is spent overseeing recruitment, governance and system processes in his executive role, much of his clinical work remains in mental health, through the GP practice and Longreach Hospital’s multidisciplinary mental health team. Both doctors enjoy their roles as GP supervisors. “I think there’s no better way of keeping up to date,” Clare says. “When you have new doctors, who come with a new perspective on medical conditions, it allows two-way education. One of the main roles is not to just impart knowledge, but to show and to model to registrars how to find information and how to create a network of health professionals who can give you advice.”