Changing lives makes hard yards of med school worth while

GROWING up, I never thought I’d become a GP. But looking back on my long and winding journey to where I am now — being able to make a real difference to people’s health throughout their own life journeys — I am extremely glad I did.

I always thought I’d be a teacher, but I would have liked to teach maths, music, and English, and I didn’t think they would fit together very well. I figured if I didn’t put medicine down as my first option when applying for university, I wouldn’t even be offered a spot, so that became my first preference. Before I could really even think about whether it was what I really wanted, there I was sitting in my first anatomy lecture.

When I was going through university, my perception of where medicine might take me was very narrow. At the time I thought I was thinking broadly, because there were lots of specialty areas that I enjoyed.

In fact, my line at the time was “I don’t know what I want to be, but I don’t want to be a GP!” I had no idea how varied and fulfilling general practice would be.

An important message for medical students who really aren’t sure what the future has in store, and a message which

Lisa Clarke

rings true for all, is that it’s OK not to know, there’s no hurry to decide, and that you can change your mind many times in order to find what’s truly right for you.

Med school was med school — the lectures were long, the exams were hard, there was so much to learn, and not much time to think about what all this knowledge might lead to.

But I loved uni. I made some great friends and thoroughly immersed myself in uni life, including societies, social sports, costume parties, the usual stuff.

I decided to take a year off and travel between my fifth and final year of uni. This experience gave me some really interesting insight into healthcare in other parts of the world, and people generally.

My year off uni was a good decision, and my life would be very different now had I not done that.

After completing my studies, I moved to Adelaide to work as a junior doctor and spent the next five years working in various hospital specialties, interspersed with some locum work which took me to other parts of Australia and abroad.

Finally, I returned to Hobart and commenced emergency medicine training. I liked it, I had the pleasure of working with some fantastic people, there were many aspects that I loved, but I felt that something was missing.

Eventually I realised it was because I wanted to be able to prevent illness and injury, not just treat after the fact, and I wanted to be able to follow

people up. So I applied and got into GP training, got my fellowship, and now here I am, working two to three days in general practice, two days in medical education (for GP registrar training), and I still have time for my other passions — friends and family, the outdoors, fitness and coaching gymnastics.

I get to use skills from all those specialty areas I considered and after all those school years thinking I’d be a teacher then landing in medical school, here I am teaching too.

The things that bring me the most satisfaction in general practice are the patients who successfully make changes to improve their health and reduce their risk of disease — diet improvements, becoming more active, weight loss, smoking cessation, drug and alcohol issues.

I love it when I get to deprescribe things like cholesterol or blood pressure tablets, and when depressed or anxious teens come back and tell me they have attended school every day this week or haven’t harmed themselves for over a month.

The thing that brings me the most joy in general practice is really getting to know my patients and looking after them over time, for example travelling with them on their fertility journey then meeting their new baby, seeing them embrace parenthood, and watching their children develop. Other specialists get to see people for bits of their journey, but only GPs get the whole experience. It really is a privilege to get to know people in this way.

At a conference I attended this year a non-GP referred to GPs as “the real life saving doctors”, and I admit I had never thought about it in that way. It’s well-known that primary care is the most cost effective part of our healthcare system, but I’d never really thought about it in terms of patient lives per doctor, and I guess it’s because there is no easy way of measuring lives saved due to prevention and early intervention.

Although my path to here was long, and took many different turns along the way, I really do feel like as a GP, I am exactly where I should be.