Supporting rural and remote doctors' health
Jill Benson1, Margaret Kay2, Shaun Prentice3
1MBBS, PhD, FACRRM, National Lead Medical Educator @ Remote Supervision, The Royal Australian College of General Practitioners, Adelaide, SA.
Background:
Caring for over a quarter of the population, rural and remote general practitioners (GPs) have a vital role in Australia. Yet, their access to healthcare faces major barriers.
Objective:
The aim of this article is to outline the impediments to rural and remote GPs accessing holistic healthcare and discuss solutions to this issue.
Discussion:
Rural and remote areas face major workforce shortages, increasing workloads for GPs. This severely limits rural GPs' accessibility to their own healthcare. These challenges compound the barriers all doctors face to accessing care, including trust and stigma. Current supports either focus too narrowly on factors such as resilience or cannot offer long-term management. A rural outreach program where rural and remote communities are visited and then followed up by a GP has been run successfully in South Australia and the Northern Territory for some years and offers a practical model to deliver rural and remote GPs the healthcare they need and deserve.
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