2022 will be the beginning of my post graduate education in medicine and y the start of 2026 I will be a fully qualified Doctor. Four years is a lot of time for experiences and opportunities to occur in, so, while I have ideas of where I would like to apply myself, I am still staying open to what the future may bring.

An area of significant interest to me right now though, is women’s health. As a young Minjungbal woman of Yugambeh-Bundjalung Jugun from a rural area, I have struggled to access medical expertise by doctors who are willing to investigate and uncover the causes of my ill health. As a woman, too often our worries are dismissed and too often is the main solution for any ailment to ‘just go on the pill’. Despite this I am privileged as I have the ability and time to pursue other avenues and health professionals to help me. As a doctor I want to provide personalised care that genuinely finds and treats the root cause of illness rather than just band-aid the symptoms. I believe that, regardless of who or where you are, you should be able to access high quality, culturally and physically safe medical care. It is this vision tat makes me so passionate about Indigenous women being able to access such care preceding throughout and subsequent to childbirth for both her and her baby.

Unfortunately Indigenous mothers and their babies continue to experience poorer health outcomes before and after birth, particularly if they live in rural and remote areas. The systemic change required to improve the statistics and personal experiences of our women is not easily come by. Systemic change is the result of many individuals working together and I intend to add my qualifications and voice as a young Minjungbal woman to organisations such as Birthing on Country to be an advocate fro this change. Birthing on Country requires so many people in different capacities; doctors, researchers, advocates, and Indigenous woman themselves, with people working in inter sectional roles. The aim is to facilitate the return of the birthing process to Indigenous communities enabling culturally appropriate care specific of the mother, her mob and community traditions. There is hard evidence that the fostering of traditional birthing alongside medical checks and guidance helps ‘close the gap’ in both mental and physical health statistics, allowing families to connect with and preserve their traditions.

I know that wherever I end up as a health professional it is here that I want to make a change. Here being in the individual lives of those around me, and here being in the building blocks for tomorrow.

We did 2 units this semester, one is the normal medical school unit worth most the semesters credit, but the other was my Service Learning unit. The Service Learning unit is designed to “engage students with non-government organisations in a way that yields positive outcomes for the student and the host organisation and develops a reflective, cross-culturally appropriate approach to problems offered by the host organization”. Our project involved collaborating with Goolarri Media, an Indigenous-owned and operated media corporation. Together, we worked to gather Broome community input on health issues that they found important, and used the feedback to design a culturally safe and informative health promotion video. This whole process was not anything like what I have done before. I was very fortunate my student project partner had previously spent 17 years as a Journalist with ABC Broome and was well versed in the necessities and contacts to put together such a project.

In summary, it was amazing. We went out and got to speak to small groups in sessions to establish what issues they believe need more coverage and how they would like to see a health promotion done. We put together a master list of ideas and worked out what was feasible with our limited time and non-existent budget. Then made several storyboards for video ideas and refined our list with input from Goolarri Media. We got a final draft, a great cast and a shooting date and filmed! Goolarri Media donated the professional crew and time and we now have a video being edited that will hopefully be aired next year.

It was such an amazing process and I learnt so, so much. It was a great way to engage in medicine beyond hospitals and textbooks and we have a very real product of our efforts on the way which I am very proud of.

One of the harder parts of the semester is that I think that medicine can be mentally difficult sometimes due to the psychological pressure of trying to be perfect and know everything, when realistically you never will. I’m with an amazing, engaged group of people that know a lot of things. It is fantastic because we help each other and support each other but sometimes on down days, it is difficult not to compare progress or feel as though you are behind on certain concepts that other people seem to breeze through. I think its in times like these where I find exercise, a long walk on the beach, patting a dog or calling home a very cathartic moment that grounds me to the real world, away from medicine, and reminds me that my journey is my own and that I am more than whatever grade comes back on a piece of paper.

Looking to 2025, we have a compulsory medical elective unit in between 2024 Semester 2 and 2025 Semester 1. I am VERY excited as I will be spending 1 week with my mentor, an Orthopaedic Surgeon who specialises in Paediatric and developmental orthopaedics. Then, I will go to Papua New Guinea to attend placement at Kundiawa General Hospital, in the Cimbu Province. I was lucky enough to set this up through a Paediatric doctor I met in Broome who is from Cimbu, and he will assist me to spend time in a local Highlands village, as well as support my learning through several wards at the hospital.

It will be an amazing to experience a new place, and to see the approach to healthcare in a new country. As a developing country with a huge population boom, the doctor to population ratio is extremely low, and I have heard creativity and broad skill bases are used to help keep a lot of hospitals running. I am excited  to engage with doctors, nurses and patients and see how I can develop my own practices to be a better, more creative practitioner.

Papua New Guinea is also home to over 800 distinct languages that are fluently spoken. I am interested to see how communication works there and to understand how they have conserved so many diverse languages in a modernising world, when many of our communities languages are at risk of becoming extinct.

My personal goal this semester was similar to last semester, to assist in the delivery of a baby. Last semester we had some issues with our ability to engage in continuity of care on the Labour ward. We flagged this with our medical co-ordinators, implemented their suggestions and still had difficulties. I then consulted the other students and composed a letter on behalf of our site based student cohort to formally raise the matter with our teaching staff and the RCS program. We received feedback that it would be raised internally at the hospital and be discussed with staff. It was daunting but I am very happy that I raised our concerns, there was a change within the department and I got to assist in the delivery of not 1 but, 2 beautiful babies! It was really great to be involved in the antenatal care, help throughout the labour process and then assist with the delivery itself. It is just a really special experience to be a part of welcoming someone into the world, and despite being a small amount of time, you get to form a lovely connection with the amazing Mums carrying and creating these tiny bubs.

Overall I am very happy with my results this year. This is the highest set of marks I have achieved since starting Med school and I am really proud of myself. I feel like the knowledge I have been building on, and the extra time and effort I have put in on placement is finally paying off. I have also found that living with other medical students and studying with them regularly has been immensely helpful. It is motivation for the days I don’t want to do anything, it is new perspectives of approaching questions and it is a regular set of study sessions. I found Broome a really great environment for my learning, and as such I want to try meet up with a likeminded bunch of students regularly when I’m back in Perth. Hopefully this will set me up well for my final year.

Outside of University…

As I’m on Rural Clinical School, it’s a bit harder to be engaged with campus university activities however up here I’ve been involved with hospital netball and rugby teams. I also started teaching a few people informally in horse riding lessons. All had their own horses already but I used to ride full time and work on a stud so began giving some informal lessons in return for getting to ride their horses when they weren’t – a great arrangement for me!

I was accepted to the PRIDoC conference this year and am very excited to be attending for my first time in December on Kaurna county (Adelaide), and getting to meet the other delegates from Aoteora, Hawai’i, Taiwan, the United States and Canada. The topic this year, “Our Language, Our Culture, Our Health” is both exciting and highly relevant, and I’m very interested in hearing the differences and similarities in the challenges that our other First Nations doctors face, and how they are innovating to address them.

I am working with the ESCALATE project currently, collecting surveys and doing interviews with mob who have kids in hospital. We also began data analysis and expanded to surveys to an additional hospital site. The focus of the study is seeing if families have felt heard when interacting with the staff and whether there are culturally safe and appropriate means for them to escalate care.

I’m hoping to continue being involved in the ESCALATE research project, and get my name on a paper so that I can improve my chances at being accepted into a specialty college and training. I complete my studies in 2025, which is scarily close now, so it is also a pathway to participate in more projects.

At this time, my partner and I are looking at moving to Broome to complete my internship, which will hopefully continue setting up my career and help me get into the ACRRM (Australian College of Remote and Rural Medicine) so that I can become a rural generalist. As a rural generalist I will be equipped with the emergency and general skills to practice medicine in remote communities and rural areas, and enable me to look after mob on their country.