Ear, nose and throat surgeon Gerard Fogarty exits Albury hospital

The ear, nose and throat specialist will no longer undertake procedures or be on-call for Albury hospital, after starting his career on the Border in 1989.

A retirement afternoon tea was held for Dr Fogarty on Friday August 4, with the centrepiece a cake featuring a giant nose with would-be blood drops coming from its nostrils.

Ear, nose and throat clinical nurse specialist Virginia Mitchell, who joined Dr Fogarty in theatre for countless operations, gave a speech lauding the surgeon's approach.

"For so many years you have put your patients first, you have treated them with respect, as someone's mother, father, brother, sister, husband, wife or child," Ms Mitchell said.

"Your knowledge, your experience and your compassion and care was never-ending, at times being detrimental to your own health.

"You treated staff, and people who you were working with, with respect and were happy to teach and have a bit of a laugh."

Dr Fogarty, who was drawn to Albury from interstate by fellow ear, nose and throat surgeon Kevin Holwell after his colleague Neil Vallance returned to Melbourne, estimates he has done around 20,000 operations across the region's hospitals extending from Griffith to Benalla.

He plans to continue seeing patients privately as he moves away from the acute emergency surgical world.

That arena has seen him undertake a wide variety of operations, one of which involved a child who had a mysterious translucent object in their throat.

"It had the impression of a tumour but you couldn't see what was wrong because it was clear," Dr Fogarty said.

"I did it with (paediatric surgeon) Tracey Merriman and we were just flabbergasted.

"We finally recognised it was a contact lens and the parents said 'oh well we had the grandparents in a few weeks ago and they must have found it on the floor'.

"That would be the most peculiar one we had."

Dr Fogarty also worked to dislodge safety pins "inhaled" by mothers preparing nappies, removed objects that children put up their nostrils and extracted dentures.

He said the level of ear, nose and throat treatment had risen in his time on the Border with the opening of the cancer centre leading to more integrated care and surgical complexity.

"Across all the surgical sub-specialities rural manpower has actually been diminishing and not increasing," Dr Fogarty said.

"We have a terrible problem with orthopods here, we have terrible trouble getting urologists, we're short on urologists, this is just a fact.

"It's not just Albury, it's all over the place."

Albury Wodonga Health is recruiting to fill the gap caused by Dr Fogarty's retirement and has partially filled the role as it continues to seek surgeons amid a national shortage.

Dr Fogarty, who worked in Perth and Adelaide after graduating from university in Melbourne, recalled that as an intern, while driving home from a snow trip to Falls Creek, his interest in Albury was triggered.

"You come to that point on the Kiewa Valley Highway where you go across to Bright and I can remember looking up the valley and it said 'Albury 75 kilometres or something' and you could see the lights of Albury in the distance and I remember thinking 'wouldn't that be a good place to live'," Dr Fogarty said.

"Isn't that the strangest thing."

Dr Fogarty time on the Border began when Albury Base Hospital was opposite the botanic gardens and he was involved in planning for the new medical campus at East Albury.

Fellow ear, nose and throat surgeon Eliza Tweddle paid tribute to him in a statement read at the afternoon tea.

"Gerard is an exemplary ENT surgeon who puts patient care first and has contributed to the wider Albury-Wodonga community and its ENT health for the last 30 years at numerous levels," Dr Tweddle wrote.

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