Rural doctors in Victoria: How Megan Belot became a country GP

Rural areas may be crying out for GPs, but Kerang doctor Megan Belot seemed born for the role.

SOME of you may remember We Need A GP, Kerang’s Northern District Community Health’s song — and accompanying viral video — from two years ago. Desperate to get a new doctor to the town, hospital staff and patients sang along to the tune of Queen’s I Want To Break Free, immediately setting themselves apart from the more run-of-the-mill job advertisements.

Megan Belot was one of the doctors who answered the call.

The GP-anaesthetist, now 35, saw the video on Facebook, but had also been in contact with NDCH’s chief executive.

While she knew taking on the job would simplify her own work schedule — at that point split between roles at Echuca and Cohuna — she knew how much Kerang wanted doctors in that role, and the difference having a permanent GP, rather than relying on locums, has for patients.

“It’s the same as any other person we go and get our services from whether it’s a hairdresser or accountant or that sort of thing — it’s the building of that relationship,” she says.

“But it’s also safety as well, that continuity of care so things aren’t missed or lost.”

Filling a GP role can be tough, Rural Workforce Agency Victoria’s Trevor Carr confirms, with many factors playing a role, especially location.

There were 55 GP roles being advertised in the Murray region of Victoria — which includes swathes of Victoria running parallel with the river, from Mildura to Corryong — through the RWAV as of yesterday. (It is not to be taken as a comprehensive list, as not everyone advertises their roles here.) Another 38 were advertised in Gippsland, and 47 for Western Victoria.

Megan’s inspiration to become a rural doctor is easy to find.

First, there is her parents. Megan says her mum, a midwife, would come home with “great stories of delivering babies”.

But her dad also had a motorbike accident when he was 18, and had chronic leg ulcers when Megan was a kid.

“It was just seeing him deal with that, I think, that really led to me wanting to be a doctor,” she says.

But there is another family story from the 1930s. Megan’s great-grandfather, suffering from appendicitis, rode his horse from Goolgowi to Hay in the NSW Riverina, a journey of about 110km. But because there was no doctor there, he was forced to continue riding to Shepparton — another 260km away. He completed the journey, but too late to be saved. Megan says it meant his family was forced to uproot to Melbourne.

Combined with a love of the iconic TV show A Country Practice, can it be surprising that Megan ended up in medicine?

During her studies at Monash University, Megan did placements across country Victoria as well as in Melbourne. She also spent six weeks in Uganda.

She would go on to work in places such as Bairnsdale (where her interest in becoming a GP- anaesthetist was sparked), Darwin, Katherine, remote indigenous communities, did locum work across Australia, and even worked on Christmas Island.

But by anyone’s standards, 2015 in Broken Hill was a life-changing year. Megan fulfilled her dream of working with the Royal Flying Doctor Service; sat the exams to join both the Australian colleges for rural and remote medicine and GPs; and met her future husband, who was working as a stock agent. They later moved back to Echuca, bought their own farm at Gunbower, and last year welcomed a baby boy.

Megan is still on maternity leave, but is preparing to return to work at Cohuna and Echuca in anaesthetics. When five-month-old Mack is a little older, she hopes to go back part-time as a GP at Kerang.

And while she says she has “slightly itchy feet”, having time off has not only meant that she has “discovered” much more about her local area in her spare time (“time to look outside medicine has been really good,” she says), it has also given her more time to spend on her other roles.

Megan is president of Rural Doctors Association of Victoria, a volunteer role. One of the projects it is working on now, Megan says, is developing a pathway through studies and training for those doctors who want to work in the country. Earlier this month, she attended a parliamentary lunch in Canberra.

“It is about the rural communities at heart,” she says of RDAV. “We don’t want services taken away from communities and we want those doctors to feel like they are supported.”

Megan says there are some tough parts to being a rural doctor: dealing with really sick patients you can’t evacuate fast enough; limited resources; a lack of doctors leading to an occasional feeling of pressure to see everyone; the lack of support on the ground for mental health patients.

But then there is the relationships with nursing staff and other colleagues at small hospitals. “It’s really quite a close-knit circle getting to do really awesome medicine, really.”

There is also the feeling of being involved in the birth with someone you know; seeing that baby you delivered, or that life you saved, walking towards you in the street. “It’s something you have to keep to yourself, but you can think, yep you gave me a hell of a night, kid!”

There must be many of those days and nights as a country doctor. And, what a reward.