Julia Creek: Doctor stands up for colleagues as desperate towns offer $500k salaries to attract GPs
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A doctor has criticized the public for wondering how a rural town still can’t recruit a GP after offering a $500,000 salary and a house to live in.
dr. Originally from Scotland, Michael Mrozinski referred to Julia Creek in the Queensland outback, which offers a base salary between $400,000 and $514,000.
The successful candidate will be paid by the North West Hospital and Health Service, but the council is also doing its best, offering a brand new four-bedroom home for free and a promise to help find a job for the GP’s partner. .
Julia Creek, with a population of just over 500 people, 600 km west of Townsville, where Dr. Mrozinski said the extreme remoteness was the biggest problem.
“Maybe it’s not just about the money,” he told his 300,000 followers in a TikTok video.
“Maybe doctors don’t care much about money… we’re not robots.”
The town of Julia Creek in northern Queensland is offering half a million dollars a year in salary to attract a doctor to work there. Pictured is a stock photo of a doctor talking to a patient
He said a doctor’s life is much more than how much money they make.
“Maybe it will be twelve years since they graduated, by the time they get to this stage and complete the national generalist training.
“They might have a family, they might have some kids, they might have a house, they might have a good social network…
“Why would they want to move all that and go to some remote area where they don’t have anyone?”
dr. Mrozinski’s frustration with the expectations of the general public was evident in the video as he called on people to understand that doctors are people.
“It’s like people think doctors shouldn’t really have a life and just work 24/7,” he said.
Tellingly, he said that’s exactly what a doctor would do in a job like the one in Julia Creek.
dr. Mrozinski regularly works in rural Australia but said that after spending three or four weeks in the country, he needs some time to recover from the workload.
‘It is not easy. I don’t sit all day, I do a lot of work in the clinic during the day and then I’m in the emergency room at night,” he said.
Julia Creek in central North Queensland, 600 miles west of Townsville, offers a base salary of between $400,000 and $514,000 for the right person and also promises to help find a GP partner job
He said that in any given week there would be at least two occasions when he would be awake for several hours at night and it was very rare that someone would be there to take him over the next day shift.
dr. Mrozinski reviewed and replied to the comments on a media story about the Julia Creek job.
He read the suggestion that Australia “should seek out and train local people to become doctors.”
His answer was that ‘they do – they send them to the universities in the metropolitan areas and eventually they meet a partner there, start a family and stay there. Can you blame them?’
Pictured is the North West Hospital and Health Service ad offering a huge salary to work in Julia Creek
Another commentator supported doctors, saying that doctors in rural areas ended up ‘working 24/7 on demand with no schools for children, no jobs for partners’.
“Absolutely,” said Dr. Mrozinski.
“It can be a very lonely lifestyle when you’re working, and I can only do it for a certain amount of time.
“We’re not robots, we’re humans and we need everything the same as everyone else.”
One commentator said Australia should bring in more doctors from abroad to work in rural areas, including those who would otherwise be based in third world countries.
But dr. Mrozinski quickly shut down this idea.
dr. Mrozinski said it was a ‘very lonely lifestyle’ to work in a rural area and that doctors were not ‘robots, we are humans and we need everything the same as everyone else’
“How ethical it is to steal doctors from other countries, from third world countries, and bring them to Australia to work in our remote areas,” he said.
The doctor focused on the particular difficulties of being the only doctor in a city.
“It’s 24/7. You could be called at any time. You can have a traffic accident that you have to take care of yourself, multiple traumas, terrible things,” he said.
“No support and no breaks.”
Finally, he had to deal with a commentator who said, ‘You don’t become a doctor because you want to help people. I know you have to be paid, but that’s what matters now’.
‘It’s not. They offer $500k and no one takes it. How can you not understand that? There’s more to life than money,’ he clapped back.