At a time when many young doctors are turning away from general practice, new Wollongong practitioner Megan Lovesey is bucking the trend.
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Dr Lovesey has just taken up a position at Ochre Health Medical Centre, which is located in the Oxford on Crown building on Lower Crown Street.
She originally moved from Sydney, via Western Australia, to Wollongong to complete her hospital training, but has decided to put down roots in the city to fulfil her long held dream of becoming a GP.
"I enjoyed my time working in hospitals, but I knew it was not the environment for me long term," she said.
"It felt a bit too transactional.
"Instead I wanted the opportunity to follow people up, look after several generations of the same family, and be the ongoing care-provider. It's really rewarding to see the long term impact you can have in making people's lives better."
According to the Royal Australian College of GPs, it's getting harder and harder to convince young doctors of these benefits, with applications from people wanting to specialise in general practice falling to their lowest level in more than five years.
The college's application figures show that 1394 medical graduates applied to do general practice training for the 2023 intake, down from a high of 2104 applications in 2017.
In places like the Illawarra, where patients are already facing long wait times for GPs, doctors have warned a lack of new candidates will put even more pressure on the struggling health system.
At the University of Wollongong, medical students are chosen for their interest in becoming a GP and spend a significant part of their training working alongside GPs in rural and regional areas.
Interim Dean of Medicine Professor Nicholas Glasgow said historically, 71 per cent of the school's graduates ended up specialising in general practice, but that the proportion of people choosing to become GPs was dropping each year.
"There is a real issue that needs to be thought through nationally as to how we continue to make general practice attractive to medical graduates because the proportion of medical students who are setting their sights on general practice is falling every year across the board," he said.
He said the factors behind this were complex and many, with the problem requiring a national solution.
For instance, he said the rates of pay for GPs were lower than other medical disciplines and financial pressures to push patients through the system quickly were making the job satisfaction that attracted people like Dr Lovesey difficult to achieve.
"Bulk billing is really important in terms of access to care and equity of care, but it's very difficult to run a viable practice by bulk billing alone," Prof Glasgow said.
"The only way round that is trying to increase throughput of patients, and that takes the joy out of general practice - where you are really getting to know a group of people who come to see you over a period of time and you get to know the family and their friends.
"If there's pressure to have rapid throughput of patients, then it become much more like a service thing, where you're just signing a script or filling out a form and some of the attraction of general practice is lost."
Prof Glasgow also said that GPs were facing an increasingly complex workload with an ageing population, and said - especially in regional and rural areas - succession planning was a major problem.
"Our students spend a entire year out in general practices distributed across NSW, and almost without exception they are incredibly enthusiastic about their experiences out on these placements. That's one of the reasons we have that 71 per cent choosing general practice.
"But if we look at the practices that take our students, we've got issues starting to appear that the GPs who have been taking students are reaching retirement and in some of these rural places, there are not other GPs coming in to take their place."
He said the foundations of the Australian health system would fail if something wasn't done to address the issues facing general practice.
"National health workforce needs are huge, and general practice has been the foundation on which much of primary care has been built in this country and the system anticipates that will continue to be the case, but it won't be the case is there aren't any GPs working in that space," Prof Glasgow said.
Kate McIlwain
For more than a decade, I've helped the Illawarra Mercury set the news agenda across the region. Currently I'm the paper's health reporter - covering the stories of Illawarra workers and residents in the wake of a global pandemic and at a time where our health systems are stretched to the limit.
For more than a decade, I've helped the Illawarra Mercury set the news agenda across the region. Currently I'm the paper's health reporter - covering the stories of Illawarra workers and residents in the wake of a global pandemic and at a time where our health systems are stretched to the limit.
