Mirboo North and District Community Foundation doctors clinic plans

Mirboo North is planning on building a new clinic for its doctors. This is how they’re achieving it, and why this type of model is a remedy for other barriers for doctors in the bush.

Transformation: Paul Pratt and Dr Sonya Moncrieff at the garden nursery where the clinic is planned to be. Picture: Chloe Smith

THE investment Mirboo North locals made into their health system decades ago is coming full circle.

Initially there was the local bush nursing hospital, which over the years transitioned to a community-owned aged care facility. When that was was sold to a professional provider 10 years ago the proceeds, some $5 million, were invested into the Mirboo North and District Community Foundation. And now, with local GPs in need of a permanent home, the foundation has major plans to build a new doctors’ clinic in the centre of town.

Foundation chairman Paul Pratt, who has lived in the South Gippsland town since 1995, says the project was a logical choice for the foundation.

“We’ve been lucky that we’ve always had GPs in the town of Mirboo North, servicing Mirboo North and the surrounding district,” he says. “But what happened was the GPs used to be based in the aged care facility, but the aged care facility did a major renovation and increased the number of beds but that involved the doctors having to move out.”

In the interim, the doctors have been working out of a home in a residential street. So, with everyone including doctors “calling out for certainty in these uncertain times”, the foundation decided to act.

“We realised we’ve got all this money because of providing health services to our community. We’ve got this money because of all the great work volunteers have done over many, many years, and the last thing we need to do is lose our doctors,” Paul says.

“So we decided we’ve got the money, the doctors are really desperate for a permanent home, so why don’t we build it?”

The foundation has bought a site, a garden nursery, in the main street and the plans have been submitted to the council. Paul says the hope is that the new facility will hold the town’s GPs, as well as other allied health services, specialists and pathology.

“We want to ensure we’ve got the doctors here so that people have good access to health care, and that makes the whole area better because people are getting the treatment they need, plus its an incentive for people wanting to move to our area,” Paul says.

“And we didn’t want to lose our doctors. If we lose our doctors then you’ve got to travel half an hour either to Latrobe Valley or you’ve got to go 25 to 30 minutes to Leongatha (and) those doctors in Leongatha are pretty full.”

One of the three local GPs, Dr Sonya Moncrieff, says she loves the “continuity of care” she provides as a GP and the “spectrum that a rural general practice provides”.

She says the increase in the size of the facility to accommodate more doctors was important “because at the moment my wait time for appointments is about six weeks”, but also an opportunity to provide even more health services locally, and more often.

She says she had investigated privately funding a facility, but it was “not viable” financially for one person.

“So it was doubly exciting when we found out the foundation was definitely going ahead with this and wanting to benefit the community in such an important way,” she says.

“Communities where there’s not health facilities will probably have to look into this. As a doctor in the country we can get a job anywhere, and if there is already a purpose-built facility that would be more attractive to attracting and retaining doctors than if you have to do it all from the ground up.”

It is for this precise reason that Rural Doctors Association of Australia chief executive Peta Rutherford says this type of model was “increasingly popular” as it allows “easy entrance, gracious exit”.

She says it removes some of the barriers for recruiting GPs because they do not have to “invest a substantial amount of money to set up a general practice and small business, because that’s what a general practice is”.

(It is not always the community behind these initiatives across the country — it can be councils or state governments, she says.)

“We’ve got a generational change, and we’re right in the midst of it, where young doctors are keen, very interested in going rural … but it’s not necessarily something they’re going to do for 20 or 30 years,” she says.

“Like many other professions, people will change jobs. And people change jobs every five to seven years, and they may stay in the same sector, but they don’t necessarily stay in that one job for 30 years.

“What we then see is decisions being made in relation to ‘how much do I have to invest?’ ‘Am I going to lose money in the short to medium-term if I leave?’ and things like that.”

Back at Mirboo North, Paul was hopeful building can start after the Christmas break, with the doctors in the building in 12 months’ time.

While this may be the biggest project the foundation has undertaken to date, over the years it has given grants of $1.4 million to more than 70 organisations.

As he looks ahead to the new project, Paul pays tribute to the decisions made in the past that have put the foundation in its current position. “What we’re doing now is because of what our forefathers and foremothers did generations ago to actually build the bush nursing hospital, build the age care,” he says.

“Hopefully, in 100 years’ time, people will look back and say look what our grandparents did back then because it flows on for generations and we reap the benefits of what the generations before us have done.

“And I’m not sure we always recognise that in our current society, which is more (attuned to) instant satisfaction and instant gratification.”

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