Many women and their families living in rural SA wish to have their pregnancy and birth managed as close to home as possible. Rural generalists with obstetrics and gynaecology training provide this service.

By undertaking training in paediatrics, you’ll develop skills to meet the community needs in child health. Children in rural Australia are more likely to face social, economic, and environmental conditions that result in poorer health and development outcomes.

This advanced skill is best suited for registrars who wish to work with Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people for a large part of their career. If you choose to train in this skill, you’ll need to reflect on your own values, culture, identity, and practice and be willing to adapt.

Internal medicine makes up the majority of clinical workload in rural and remote general practice. By undertaking the internal medicine advanced skill, you’ll build skills and knowledge in prevention and treatment of adult diseases.

Undertaking the mental health advanced skill will enable you to offer specialised mental health services to your community and provide an advisory resource in mental health to other GPs.

Build upon your basic surgical abilities and focus on additional surgical and endoscopy skills. An RG with surgical skills works in a rural hospital alongside skilled medical, nursing, and allied health professionals delivering anaesthetics, emergency medicine, obstetrics and gynaecology services.

Rural and remote areas within SA require rural generalists to administer anaesthesia. As a rural generalist with anaesthesia skills you’ll work with a diverse and highly-skilled medical team in rural hospitals to support surgery and other procedures otherwise not possible in rural communities.

Remote medicine is characterised by geographical, professional, and social isolation of practitioners, involving a multidisciplinary approach, overlapping and changing roles of team members, and a relatively high degree of GP substitution. You’ll be learning public health, emergency, and extended clinical skills in a cross-cultural context.

Develop a broader range of skills than many colleagues in urban teaching hospitals, due to limited physical resources, reduced availability of specialist staff, and longer lead times for retrieval to more specialised centres. Unlike doctors in urban hospital emergency departments, the rural emergency department doctor is usually required to provide autonomous initial management of most patients.

Undertaking academic practice in a location offers the opportunity for research into the variation in illness profile and lifestyle, the greater burden of chronic disease, lower socioeconomic and educational status compared to urban settings, and other important limitations in rural communities.

There is an imperative for the delivery of population health services in rural areas to address inherent health inequalities. As a rural generalist registrar in these areas, you have an opportunity to improve the health of whole communities through population health approaches.

An approach that improves the quality of life of patients and their families facing the problem associated with life-threatening illness, through the prevention and relief of suffering by means of early identification and impeccable assessment and treatment of pain and other problems, physical, psychosocial and spiritual.