When a country town loses its doctor, the impact can be profound.
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But often it’s only when you live in a small community that you can fully appreciate just how this affects ordinary people in their everyday lives.
A few years ago, during the ongoing debate about the proposed Murray Darling medical school network, the ignorance in the big cities of the difficulties this presents were made clear.
And it went to the heart of why so many who live in the capitals have absolutely no idea of what country life is like.
In turn that means they do not know of the hardship, the dislocation and the simple negative effect on people’s health there can be from not having ready access to a GP.
One critic was the head of a city-based group representing trainee doctors at some of the nation’s most prestigious universities, claiming it would drag much-needed training dollars away from the established old schools. It smacked of a privileged group doing their best to protect their lucrative patch.
Training doctors in rural areas, much analysis concludes, means a greater likelihood of them staying in the country.
The Murray Darling school approach has been tempered by the federal government, which instead has favoured incorporating existing schools. Now there is a new undergraduate degree program in Albury-Wodonga and Bendigo, taught by La Trobe University, and a postgraduate program from the University of Melbourne at Shepparton that will solely take top students from a rural background.
And so good things are being done to make a rural and regional medical career achievable, though for now the struggle faced by many communities continues.
It is a situation we hope can be remedied in the short-term for the sake of the Holbrook community, but also included in the ongoing debate to improve rural medical care.
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