Rachelle Ramos

My name’s __________, I’m a Rayson Monash Graduate. I completed my undergraduate degree with Monash Univeristy, I spent my pre-clinical year at Churchill and then I went to Sale for my second year and my third year I was a Warrego student which included rotations at Warrego Hospital, Traralgon Hospital and also GP rotation at Trafalgo Medical Center. And then final year I was spread out sort of all across the country which included a few rural rotations including aged care at Heyfield. I’ve enjoyed sort of the flexibility that you get when you go rural and working closely with consultants and most of the work environments are quite good places to work and learn and are very encouraging of students. I chose the Gippsland rural intern training program mainly because of I’ve obviously spent a lot of time in the Gippsland hospitals and the interns that have taught me and supervised me have seemed to really enjoyed the program and I’ve seen how closely they get to work with consultants and registrars. And in this area as well, quite a lot of the registrars are rotating from Melbourne hospitals and so it’s a good chance to make a really broad range of people and to learn sort of from everyone’s different skills that they bring to their job. I selected Heyfield General Practice as one of my non-call rotations for next year. Having done aged care here I had an excellent rotation and I really enjoyed the supervision offered by all of the GPs here and the registrars. They all love teaching and try to make my time the best that I could be here so whilst I was over the aged care facility, I get to see a little bit of how the clinic worked here and decided that if I got the opportunity to come back, it would be one that I‘d take. I think there’s quite a lot of opportunity to get hands on skills, quite a lot of procedural work and being a rural GP there’s a lot of procedures that are done here and so I think that’s quite unique and specially compared to metropolitan areas. And I think specifically at this clinic, there’s an excellent system in terms of supervision, so the supervising doctor typically doesn’t see patients throughout the day. They spend their time supervising the learners and it’s not necessarily sitting in the same room, sort of watching over the shoulder. It’s more learning and practicing independently and then calling in your supervisor as necessary. And for me, I tend to learn quite well this way, doing things on my own a bit and then calling for help as needed. The parallel consulting model typically takes lots of different forms depending on how the learner requires their supervision. Typically it involves the learner seeing the patient on their own. So, they’re going to the waiting room, calling the patient, bringing them in, talking to them and going through the usual things; the history and the examination, formulating a management plan and then calling in the supervising GP to then check the management plan and to discuss the patient with. Obviously in a good learning practice you’re free to call in your supervisor whenever you need, if you’re over your head or struggling. I think the good thing about the parallel consulting is that it is flexible, it’s not a rigid model that you have to do just one way. Depending on how you’re feeling as a learner can be changed. I have to say, the majority of my career being in Gippsland, if everything goes well I think that there’s excellent opportunities both for hospital-based work and for General Practice work. Personally I’d really like to move in to General Practice sort of following the procedural as model. I’d like to do something perhaps on a part-time basis in a hospital whilst maintaining clinic work. I think Gippsland is excellent because it’s such a great place, you can work in a large town or you can work sort of more rurally such as a place like Heyfield and there’s various hospitals that do all sorts of different things. So, really it’s just up to what you want to do to pick a place to go to.