There were no medical mishaps, yet these procedures were stopped in the two country towns I worked in. It is therefore important not to create unnecessary problems and, where problems exist, to counter them. Health departments, in particular, need to be clear about their aims and should value rural doctors as a scarce resource and include them in deliberations about change. The ultimate criteria for decisions on rural workforce and hospital facilities should be the maintenance of essential services sufficient to provide safe medical care to rural and remote Australia and to use the full skills of doctors already resident in those areas. In turn, rural doctors need to be more innovative and flexible in devising methods to reduce their professional isolation, practise procedural medicine, and gain some relief from being constantly on call.
Flexibility is also essential from medical organisations and statutory bodies.
So I could only charge the same fee as a dermatologist for prolonged consultations and this simply wasn't financially viable. I was sad to leave after 10 years, but the more of my speciality I did, the less I earned, and we were simply getting deeper into debt. The increasing accent on rural issues in undergraduate medical education, the rising proportion of women doctors and the decreasing migration of doctors trained outside Australia make it difficult to estimate the needs for the rural workforce in the next decade. 6 Western Australia will therefore have to recruit 250 doctors over the next decade simply to keep pace with anticipated loss. Attention to factors shown to be important in retaining doctors would have an appreciable effect on reducing this loss.