Caption: (L) Health Department representative Dr Sibauk
Bieb launching the report along with Dr Mills.
By MATTHEW VARI
A REPORT formulated by the PNG Society of Rural and Remote Health, through the National Research Institute (NRI) has called for more focus on the training of doctors in rural medicine for the rural populous, was presented last week at NRI in Port Moresby.
Titled ‘Doctors for rural Papua New Guinea: Too hard? Or have we just stopped caring?’, the paper was presented and authored by Dr David Mills, who is the Medical Superintendent at the Kompiam Rural Hospital, in Enga Province since 2000 and is also the President of the PNG Society for Rural and Remote Health.
It called for the development of Health services in an equitable fashion and for the National Government and National Department of Health to set clear targets as to how many doctors should be in each district and develop strategies for reaching that target by 2030.
In addition the recommendations also reiterated for effective partnerships with NGO’s (non-governmental organizations) for rural health service provision where appropriate, and for the Government fully fund University of PNG’s School of Medical Health Sciences, to enable high quality rural placements for undergraduate students.
“From my time which is 15 years in Kompiam it was pretty clear early on that we were going to have to solve this problem,” Dr Mills said.
“The report is based on a presentation we did at a health conference we did back in April, so it is really a revision of that, we have been working on it for the past 6 months to 12 months.”
“The ideas have things that have evolved and come out of our work over the many years- It is not a new thing as these are issues that we were confronted with from the very start.”
He said that since the country started training its own doctors since 1962, when it set up what was then the Papuan Medical College, which produced some very fine doctors.
“When we first set up that college there a very intense Debate on what sort of doctors Papua New Guinea needed,” he said.
“The idea was to produce these Generalist Doctors (doctors who can do a bit of everything) and they would be responsible in looking after the public health needs as well as looking after a small district hospital.”
“To that end they set up what was really an advanced training program, which at that time in PNG we were leaders in the world in this issue of training doctors for rural practice.”
“They had a minimum of 3 months to work in these places, and back then it was the key part of the training that you had to do high quality rural experience in order to get a good understanding of rural medicine.”
Mills pointed out the change in the medical culture- as a group in the sense of doctors and the medical fraternity in PNG, and also made a call for more research in the area.
“What does it look like today? First of all I would like to say that we really need to do a lot of research on this issue,” he said.
“A survey in 2008 of 30 third year medical students intended career choices, A quarter wanted to be surgeon, obstetricians, surgeons, pediatricians.”
“The point of those figures is that they all want to be specialists, high end specialist occupations that are practiced in provincial high level hospitals.”
“When we asked what about a rural career, we got a nice round number meaning zero- not a single medical student wished to do rural medicine in 10 years time.”
Mills reminded the audience in mind that 80 percent of our people are living in rural areas and that a massive tragedy that our medical culture is like that.
“This is not a criticism but is a statement of the fact that our doctor culture in Papua New Guinea has become one of urban specialized rural practice as opposed to rural generalized medical practice was the original vision of the founding fathers.”
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