Doctor leaving practice
Katikati doctor Kevin Fricker is semi-retiring and has sold his share in his practice at Katikati Medical Centre to Dr Laurens Klopper, but will continue working in a locum capacity.
Kevin, 60, has been a permanent doctor at the practice for 15 years, arriving in 2004 when the late Dr Jeffrey Friis, Dr Mike Wahler and Dr Tessa Turnbull were there.
Kevin’s special medical interests are in dermoscopy and minor skin surgery.
Kevin trained at WITS (University of Witwatersrand) Medical School in Johannesburg, the Republic of South Africa, and then entered private practice in 1996.
In 2004 Kevin brought his wife and two daughters to Katikati where he enjoys sailing and managing his lifestyle farm, which has 6.5 canopy hectares of gold and green kiwifruit. He said this is the longest time he has spent at any one place. Kevin came to New Zealand because his mother had emigrated here in the 90s. He had lived in South Africa and came here to visit his sister and brother-in-law in Hamilton a year before coming to New Zealand.
“I knew a lot about New Zealand. My father’s brother lived here for 30 years. He came in the 1950s and went back to South Africa in 1976. He was a builder in Auckland.”
Kevin and wife Grear visited NZ a year before they made the move — and chose Katikati.
“We didn’t want to live south of Tauranga and we looked at the weather cams in various towns for a year. Katikati was a good opening and they were down on a doctor at the time.
“The town was smaller and quieter then.”
The Frickers had come from a much larger area in East London in South Africa with a population of over a million. They lived and worked in the suburbs.
“Schools were in the area where you lived. You worked where you lived in a small tight-knit community.
“In Katikati we’d come into another small tight-knit community and probably because I was a doctor and knew Jeff, it didn’t take long to settle.”
Their two daughters had finished school. Grear was a trained pharmacist and took a little while to settle, having worked for large international companies.
Kevin left school at 18 and was drafted into the army.
“There were more horrific things there than you’d ever see here. We’d see car accidents but land mines did a lot more damage than a car accident does.”
As a student he worked at Baragwanath Hospital doing 72-hour shifts on weekends.
“On a Friday night you’d have up to 100 gunshot wounds on one night, a good percentage ended up in theatre. Hand gun injuries most patients went home, but rifles all ended up in theatre. It was AK47s — all gang related. You see a little bit in South Auckland now.
“We used to see a lot of violence, stabbings, chopping with axes.”
Kevin went into the army as an operational medic.
“We were trained to go into battlefield with the troops and look after them.”
After that he did pharmacy for five years before studying medicine. He spent time in intensive care in a hospital. As an ICU pharmacist he advised doctors with drug interactions and medications.
“We used to make up intravenous feeds. We’d mix and make them up from scratch for individual patients. We did a lot of inhouse manufacturing. It exposed me to a different side of medicine,” he said.
Part of his army training as a sole medic was looking after the troops in camps. The last one had 400 and was in the whop whops.
“I looked after their needs — cuts and breaks — I was it. I had a mini hospital and also treated the local population with free treatment. If I got stuck I’d be on the radios to the big centres asking them what to do, what they think this is, how do I manage it. Probably a little bit of GP work.”
All the training Kevin did in South Africa he utilised here.
“When I came here doctors were not doing dermoscopy. It was new to them. No one had a dermascope here.
“In East London it was expected that GPs did all the work on skin lesions and were all trained in dermatoscopy. It’s a skill doctors all have acquired here now, which is good.”
He said the southern hemisphere is full of skin cancer. It is not unique to NZ, Australia and South Africa have similar problems.
Kevin has treated thousands of people with skin lesions. He does surgery at the medical centre. He said he can cut most things out but there are times when small skin grafts are needed.
“Big skin grafts and split skin grafts go to hospital. We don’t have the facilities or the equipment here to do them.”
Kevin used to have access to a day theatre where he’d book a theatre time, book an anaesthetist and take people there for minor surgery such as tonsillectomies and adenectomies.
“We don’t have that luxury here. It doesn’t happen in Katikati but it might happen in bigger centres, I don’t know.”
His time working in hospitals exposed him to things on the big scale. The tertiary hospital in East London where he lived had seven million people draining into one main hospital — primary, secondary and tertiary.
He has seen some nasty cancers and burns. He recalled one farmer walking with his irrigation pump through his property and hitting power lines at 11,000 volts.
“It touched him and had gone through the middle of his bone marrow and cooked him from the inside. He survived for two weeks. He only had a little burn on his foot and arm.”
People are people and there’s always going to be coughs and colds, strokes and accidents, he said.
As Katikati grows there will be more demands and a need for more doctors and nurses, administrators and space.
“When this medical centre was built they would never have envisaged Katikati growing to the extent it has. No one realised Tauranga hospital would grow and the Auckland population would sell up and put pressure on smaller centres.”
Kevin’s time in Katikati has been rewarding and he has no regrets.
“I find being in a small community you know everyone, everyone gets to know you. You watch kids growing up into mature adults. From starting primary school and finishing high school — it’s been good.”
His foray into kiwifruit came since half of his patients had kiwifruit orchards. “I kind of couldn’t get my head around the issues they were having so that’s how I got into it. It’s my de-stresser in the weekends.”
Kevin has no long term plans, other than getting in more skiing and sailing.
There are four new long term doctors at the medical centre — Laurens Klopper, David Anderson, Vicky Jones and Pamela House.