Dr Shannon Nott is emphatic in his advice for anyone considering rural GP training: he says it’s an incredibly rewarding career path where you get to choose your own adventure. And adventure is something Dr Nott is familiar with. A Churchill Fellowship scholar who has travelled to some of Earth’s most remote places to study the intersection of technology and remote medicine, he’s now working as a rural generalist, often travelling to remote outback airstrips with the Royal Flying Doctor Service. Training in the city, he met and was influenced by “incredible” mentors due to his involvement in the Rural Health Club at the University of NSW, and then the National Rural Health Student Network. But he also gets to quench his desire to work on policy and big projects through his role as a Director of Medical Services. He says the bush has always called to him, and he is happier in a rural environment. He now lives with his family on a property just outside of his base in Dubbo.

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Dr Nicholas Ireland’s journey through life to becoming a NSW Regional Doctors Network Cadet has been a long and demanding one. Expelled from boarding school in year 11, he first became a sheet metalworker on what he describes as a subsistence wage. But it was while he was working as a FIFO welder on oil rigs off the Western Australia coast that he realised he had to do something else with his life. So he quit and applied for a university foundation course and got such good marks he was accepted into medicine via a rural pathway. This boy from the bush, supported professionally and financially by the cadetship program, is now well on the way to achieving his childhood dream of becoming a rural generalist doctor, planning to settle with his wife in Dubbo.

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Participating on the NSW Rural Doctors Network was a “no brainer” for Dr Ariah Steel, who says she was attracted to the program because of the wide experience she’d gain as well as the financial support. Dr Steel had started out dreaming of being a presenter on a TV travel show, but after doing work experience with an orthopaedic surgeon her mind was instantly changed. Now happily ensconced in the Murrumbidgee Rural Generalist Training Pathway, Dr Steel says that, in spite of growing up in the city, she’s now a complete convert to rural life due to the freedom and flexibility it has given her. In fact, she says she’ll never live in a major city again.

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When asked what advice she’d give to anyone considering a NSW Rural Doctors Network Cadetship, Dr Kirbie Storrier is emphatic: “Do it, apply for it, 100%, right now, you should have already applied, what are you waiting for?”

Dr Storrier had dreamed of becoming a doctor since childhood because her farmer father, who has a chronic disease, had found it difficult to get the treatment he needed. She says she felt incredibly supported through her RDN Cadetship, where she and her partner were treated like family, and that it was an “amazing opportunity” where she gained close mentors who have continued on through her medical career.

Now a psychiatry registrar at Dubbo Health Service, Kirbie says she’s grateful to have been able to work with people who understood her dreams, her goals and her values.

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Edwina Fry was on work experience with a country GP when she witnessed a baby being born. It was a turning point in her life. She says she developed new respect for the human body and started to consider becoming a doctor herself. Now a final-year medical student studying with Deakin University, she came to medicine via an undergraduate degree and entry via the GAMSAT, which proved a hurdle, but not an insurmountable one. Edwina is undertaking a rural placement at Warrnambool in western Victoria, where the lifestyle is a definite attraction, and where the variety of clinical work, she says, will make her a better physician.

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Pepe Mifsud is the first to admit that he didn’t give himself enough credit. Throughout his childhood and formative years he’d watched his GP mother take care of their community, and he’d seen the way she and her colleagues were respected. But Pepe just didn’t think he’d ever be able to get into medicine himself, so he embarked on a commerce degree. Medicine, however, kept calling him, and he decided to study and sit the GAMSAT. Raised a rural boy on WA’s Margaret River, he chose a university with a rural focus: The University of Wollongong, with a view to undertaking a long-term rural placement. 

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If there’s one thing Dr Robin Williams is proud of, it’s providing medical care to a rural workforce that’s crucial to national food security. Happily ensconced in Molong in the Central West of NSW, and working between the local hospital and his own practice, Dr Williams believes all people — even farmers in remote locations — deserve equity in health care. A London-trained GP who hails from Wales, he decided to move his young family to rural Australia after he and his wife fell in love with the landscape and the lifestyle while on a placement. It was a desire to live near a world-renowned musician that led him to Molong, where he has established a community-supporting practice, and from where he works, on various boards, to improve community health.

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A local emergency doctor called her his “apprentice.” A determined young woman from a country town, who had wanted to be a doctor since early childhood, had done a first aid course so that she could help out at local football games. Many years later, Ashley is a fifth-year medical student at the University of Adelaide who says anyone can follow their dream to become a doctor so long as they have the ambition and tenacity. Now on a placement in outback Broken Hill, she’s a great advocate for working in rural and regional Australia and strongly recommends the mixture of relaxed lifestyle and broad medical experiences.

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Few people from Georgia Sims country town had gone to university, and she’d never heard of anyone studying medicine. But with her “anything is achievable” attitude and the support of family and friends, she’s now in her fourth year of a medicine degree, having spent time in the city and in an array of rural placements. Starting out in undergraduate paramedicine, it was while she was volunteering at a music festival that she was inspired by the leadership and the skills of a doctor supervising a resuscitation. So, Georgia applied to study medicine and, once accepted, found that her life-long pledge not to return to the bush was broken, thanks to the lifestyle and professional advantages rural practice brings. It’s been a steep learning curve, both clinically and in a personal sense, but with the most difficult days now well behind her, Georgia Sims is looking forward to a rewarding rural and regional career.

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It was sage advice from an English teacher that saw Dr Grace Nelson achieve her aspirations. She was counselled to not only celebrate her good grades, but also work hard to shrink the margin between those good marks and a perfect score of 100 per cent next time. Since primary school Dr Nelson had dreamed of becoming a rural doctor, and, through university, she realised the profession — with its intellectual rigour, contact with people and mission to help and to cure — was a perfect fit for her personality. So, she immersed herself in regional training, and after gaining experience in several centres, landed in Dubbo, which she says “ticks all the boxes.” Now, not only is she gaining a wide variety of clinical experience, but she gets to work with a close and varied team in the relaxed regional environment that she has always loved.

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