Welcome to KI DOCS
Inspired by excellent Australian blogs such as Dr Casey Parker’s (Broome Docs), Dr Cliff Reid’s (Resus.me) and Minh le Cong (PHARM), this website is aimed fairly and squarely at current (or aspiring) rural doctors in Australia.
Being a rural doctor is a challenging yet rewarding job, not least in a location like Kangaroo Island off the coast of South Australia.
Often lauded as the ‘jack-of-all-trades, master of none’, rural doctors hold their collective heads up high, proud to be true generalists…not narrow-focus partialists (or single-organ specialists). A rural doctor must be happy to be not just a primary care expert, but also to be competent in internal medicine, to perform minor surgery, to deliver a baby and to give an anaesthetic. Moreover, rural doctors often operate with minimal back-up such as easy access to blood tests, ultrasounds and CT scans.
As the emergency physicians at the excellent ‘Life In the Fast Lane‘ emergency medicine website say : “GP proceduralists in remote Australia are what most doctors were maybe eighty years ago — and what most of us dreamed of being when we went into medical school: having a baby? They’ll deliver it. Need an operation? They’ll gas you down (and they might even chop your leg off too). Got some bizarre disease no one’s ever heard of and you’re in the middle of nowhere? No worries, they’ll sort it out. You name it, if it has to be done, they’ll do it. These doctors are the princes of our profession.“
So, in this blog the KI Docs (mostly frogs, not princes) discuss issues of relevance to rural docs Australia-wide. Whereas Broome Docs, LITFL and Resus.me bring you the latest in gnarly case discussions and critical appraisal of the literature, this blog discusses some of the other factors involved in rural medicine – skills maintenance, networking, ‘getting things done’ and some of the common problems and solutions in rural medicine.
I’ll leave the clever stuff to people like Casey, Cliff & Minh!
You can check out more via the KI Medical Clinic.
Enjoy!
I am very impressed with your study. It is a credit to you. Your web site is awesome also.
It so happens I am giving an anaesthetic lecture next Thursday at our local hospital and I would like to show your Website video and other resources if you wouldn’t mind. It would be more sophisticated than I could do and is very relevant to our rural hospital. Could I have your permission for this?
Thanks David, glad you liked the paper (see post on 9-10-10 on ‘rural GP anaesthetists and difficult airway equipment’). Feel free to use downloads available from the ‘resources’ section of this site.
Hey Tim, Pretty heartfelt video I watched from a presentation you gave a few months back on dealing with our vulnerabilities. My eyes opened up to the after burying my head on this for so long when The ACS published their papers a few years back on burnout in surgeons and the high association with medical errors, subsequent distraction, more errors, abuse and potentially suicide. Then about the same time the ASA published a paper in 2012 about how rare it is for an anesthesiologist to take the day off after having just witnessed a tragedy in the OR. I talked with a CRNA who relived a story with me, whereby he watched an unfortunate mother die of hemorrhage after a delivery complication, and simply had to move onto the next case. My point is that, last year I chatted with a local Sherrif deputy who was a State Trooper and asked him how they handle this in the police service. He relayed to me the story of how he was called at 2am on a 10 degree Jan day to a scene where an intoxicated driver drove the wrong way on the interstate and slammed into a car with 4 college coeds. He said he had seen a lot, but nothing prepared him for the scene. When he got there, the steam was pouring off the bodies which were severed in two by the seatbelts. I asked if he had to go on back to work and he said that a police force counselor responded to the scene to see if they were ok. He was clearly not, so they found a replacement for him. On that note I asked Dan Linskey (ex police chief in Boston and incident commander during the marathon massacre) and he too said their police force relied heavily on on the scene therapy to assure that people were fit to go on or needed time to recover. So it seems that our first responder services do a better job of tending to their professionals than we do. I hope this video is motivation to change that. I really would like to chat about this at some point.