Placement Reviews by Prevocational Doctors
Dr Michael Ryan reflects on his amazing Prevocational Doctor placement in Oenpelli, West Arnhem Land, between July and August this year.
“Oenpelli – oh that’s beautiful country!”
The orientation in Darwin was a very good introduction to life in a community.
It was incredibly organised, and gave me a great insight in to what to expect both culturally and professionally over the coming weeks. It is certainly an essential component of the programme, and I thought it was done very well by NTGPE.
The clinic in Oenpelli is larger than I had expected, and is very well run by a team of Remote Area Nurses, a single Aboriginal Health Worker, a Community Worker, a full-time GP, a clinic driver, and receptionist. For the first 3 weeks that I was there, there was also a GP registrar who had previously spent a year of her GP training working in the clinic.
I was welcomed wholeheartedly by everyone, and was shown around the clinic on my first afternoon. The clinic was in full swing, and on my first afternoon I was accompanying 2 patients out to the airstrip to be evacuated by air to Darwin.
My role in the clinic became apparent over the coming days, and I was always comfortable and felt supported in my duties, taking on more as I felt comfortable. I think everyone’s fear is that they will be left completely unsupported in a strange place in which they have little experience of the culture or the language, but I can assure people that this is not the case …
