Jordon Hadfield studied for a medicine degree to become a rural GP,but decided psychiatry offered better work-life balance and more time with patients.Credit:James Brickwood
The result — 20 per cent less than the previous year’s cohort — has alarmed the country’s peak body for doctors,the Royal Australian College of General Practitioners (RACGP),which says declining interest in a career in general practice,combined with the introduction of government-run urgent care clinics,will lead to fewer GPs in the communities where they are most needed.
“General practice has been defunded and devalued by successive governments – it hasn’t been seen as a career of choice,” its president,Dr Nicole Higgins,said. “Medical students … can go into a non-GP specialty and earn two to three times as much as they would in general practice.”
A 2019 Deloitte Access Economic reportfound Australia would be short almost 10,000 GPs by 2030 – almost 25 per cent of the GP workforce. Urban areas were predicted to see the greatest drop-off.
Jordon Hadfield went to medical school to become a local GP to give back to her community of Cessnock in the NSW Hunter Valley.
Now in her fourth year at Western Sydney University,the 30-year-old said she wanted to pursue a career in psychiatry instead because it offered a better work-life balance and more time with patients than she had witnessed in her two GP placements.
“You’re very much run off your feet[in general practice] and you don’t really have the time or resources to help people as much as you would like to,” she said. “I think there is also a stigma about going into GP[compared with more lucrative specialties] … students don’t like the idea of going through all their training and then feeling like people don’t think that their career is as important.”