I have worked in Indigenous health for three years and throughout this time have known that my career will be in this area. During this time, I have dedicated myself to making positive changes in Indigenous health. I volunteer as a member of a national youth health and wellbeing committee which is completely Indigenous youth led, as one of two WA representatives. I work for an Aboriginal health organisation promoting and implementing an Aboriginal youth health strategy with the aim to improve health outcomes for Indigenous young people. I have worked with Aboriginal Medical Services across the state and have met many inspiring Indigenous people working in health, including doctors and medical students. I have seen how having a doctor who is Indigenous working with community can have more positive outcomes. I also work with doctors who advocate and have the power to influence change. These are all people who I look up to, and I knew that being one of those doctors is something I would love to do, but I never thought that it was possible for me. As I met more Indigenous medical students and doctors, I realised that they all have similar stories to me and have come from a similar background and faced the same challenges that I do. These experiences led me to complete the Curtin Indigenous Pre-Medicine and Health Sciences enabling course in 2021 and successfully be accepted to study Medicine in 2022.

At the Aboriginal Health Council of WA, I have worked on a project that highlights the lack of access to services in rural and remote communities. Learning this and having the opportunity to travel across WA to these communities confirmed that I am interested in regional and remote Indigenous health. When I am a doctor, my intention is to work in this space. My goal is to make a positive impact to the health of Indigenous people. I will do this by working as a General Practitioner or Rural Generalist. I will ensure I work closely with the community consistently, and provide culturally secure care.

By working with the community and continuously learning from them, I will identify barriers that exist for people in accessing health services, and will do my best to break down those barriers. I will not work solely with a clinical mindset, but a holistic one, and will consider all aspects of health that are important to Indigenous people. After building my knowledge and experience working with communities, I will advocate for systemic change for Indigenous people and their communities that will truly work to close the gap. I will do through by combining my medical knowledge, my experiences from working with Indigenous communities and my passion for creating positive change for my people. I am committed to studying medicine to achieve my overall goals, to become a doctor and make a positive change in Indigenous health.

This past semester has been quite an exciting one in my medical school journey. We have finally had the opportunity to do some clinical placements which has been very exciting. So far, I have had a community placement and a hospital week placement. For my community placement I was at the Child and Adolescent health service with a research team. I spent four days with the team learning all about different aspects of research and we got to create a simulated research project and present it to the team. It was a great learning experience, and I got an understanding of how important research is and how it is relevant to my career as a doctor.

At my hospital week placement, I was put on the neurology team. This was a very exciting experience as I got to have a taste of what it’s like being in a hospital setting and saw lots of different patients with lots of different conditions. At university I found neurology to be a difficult topic, so I was nervous about going on placement with the neurology team, but it turned out to be great for me as seeing the conditions and talking to real life patients helped me to understand the topic more and become more confident.

Another exciting part of the semester was we had our applications and interviews for Rural Clinical School to do our first hospital year in a rural location. I was successful in obtaining a position at Broome Regional Hospital next year which I am so happy about. It is where my husband is from, and we are very grateful and looking forward to moving to his Country and I’m happy I get to do my first hospital year in a regional location as it sounds like you get more hands-on experience and more focused teaching. Now I just need to make sure I keep up with my studies and pass third year so that I can get to Broome Hospital next year.