Ayra Perakath
Year 4, University of Adelaide
Lorne, VIC
Ayra is one of our own - the 2020 chair of GPSN University of Adelaide. She tells us her highlights and the awesome advantages that come when working rurally.
Some of my best experiences in Medicine to date for me, have been those where I have gotten the opportunity to engage in rural healthcare.
For my first rural medicine experience, I was allocated to the coastal town of Lorne which is a picturesque location along the Great Ocean Road in Victoria and truly a fantastic location to have spent my first three weeks of living away from my home in South Australia.
During my time away, I had some very novel experiences. I spent 9am-5pm days at the GP practice every day of the week shadowing the local GPs, physiotherapists, community nurses and social workers. They took me under their wing and made me feel like one of their own. This helped to foster within me a love for rural medicine that I never knew I had. In the short space of three weeks, I was exposed to a wide variety of situations and conditions including removal of skin cancers, helping out with stitches, hearing consults with a variety of presentations, seeing how an ED department in a rural location worked in terms of being run by the GPs. I also helped one of the doctors at the first aid stall of the local surfing event, where I got to assist with a dislocated shoulder. That drove home to me how multi-faceted the role of a GP in a rural location is. They can be relied on for just about anything and have to be skilled in so many different aspects of medicine since they are the only port of call with the non-availability of other specialists nearby. To top it all off, my lunchtimes were spent sitting by the sea, enjoying the sound of the waves hitting the shore- it was certainly something I cherished! This is one of the things I love about placement in a rural location- you get the opportunity to be involved in a clinic in a picturesque location while being part of a community who treats you as one of their own!
Since this experience, I have done a further 3 weeks in Lorne as well as 3 weeks in a rural GP clinic in the Adelaide Hills, which again gave me insight into the crucial role a GP places in a rural setting.
Highlights of rural medicine:
· You get the opportunity to be hands on from the get go, doing ECGs on patients, taking bloods, putting in IV cannulas, helping with excision procedures, parallel consulting and performing physical examinations!
· You become part of a community and get to know some lovely people
· The rural GPs are always happy to provide mini tutorials for you when they have time and to involve you as much as they can in consults
· The rural GP is the first port of call, and often the only doctor in the area, so you see a variety of presentations you might not otherwise get exposure to in the city