Interesting read about an interesting woman, couple of excerpts…
The trailblazing public health activist reflects on childhood dreams, hard-won lessons and why healthcare starts long before anyone gets sick
during her early days as a junior doctor at Princess Margaret hospital in Perth. “There was an Aboriginal boy, maybe four or five, who’d come in from a remote community,” she says. “He had severe diarrhoea and dehydration. And he died in my arms.” She pauses. “I was 25. And I remember thinking, I don’t know if I can keep doing clinical work. I need to understand how we prevent this.”
She recalls one trip to Narrogin – “one of the most racist towns in WA” – where a local doctor had refused to treat an Aboriginal child without upfront payment. “The mother raced the kid to Katanning and it died on the way,” she says. “So Eric and I got that doctor struck off the register.”
She’s outspoken about the dangers of the North West Shelf extension, describing climate change as “the biggest threat to human health”. Her disappointment over the failed voice to parliament referendum is equally fierce. “
Thanks for sharing! Have ordered her book :)
Firstly I’m a bit suss as the whole thing feels a bit like PR for her book.
She’s proudly clutching a book called First Knowledges Health: Spirit, Country and Culture, which she co-authored.
However:
“We need systems that keep people well, not the systems that pick them up after they’re broken.”
The whole system is pretty fucked. People are overworked and underpaid so that the wealthy grifters of society can make as much profit as possible while grinding the population down to dust. It’s no secret what’s wrong with things and until we have an actual revolution about the way society works I don’t see it changing.
We could start by treating insatiable greed as a mental illness and nipping it in the bud during early education.
It really is a mental illness, but it’s normalised and celebrated.
The privatisation of healthcare is what’s killing people, but by all means, ignore the problem, build more hospitals and hire more doctors while continuing to gut medicare and further limit people’s ability to obtain affordable healthcare just so you can hoard more power and made up currency. Late stage capitalism is a cancer.
where a local doctor had refused to treat an Aboriginal child without upfront payment
I wonder why he’d do that…🙄
“So Eric and I got that doctor struck off the register.”
That’s really good now instead of not being able to help 1 person he can’t help any, and it’s not like there’s a shortage of doctors or anything in regional Australia
GP shortage contributing to ‘bidding war’ as regional towns struggle to attract doctors
https://www.abc.net.au/news/2025-01-22/regional-remote-gp-shortage-bidding-war/104837214
Oh… lady sounds insufferable
where a local doctor had refused to treat an Aboriginal child without upfront payment
I wonder why he’d do that…🙄
Racism, and because you don’t know anything more about the story - and yet you’re making the same assumptions… Welll.
The doctors claimed justification for turning them away is largely irrelevant anyway, as doctors cannot turn a patient away that is in dire medical need without ensuring the patient has alternative care options immediately available, eg: another doctor nearby. Telling them to fuck off to Perth 3 hours away is in breech.
That’s really good now instead of not being able to help 1 person he can’t help any, and it’s not like there’s a shortage of doctors or anything in regional Australia
GP shortage contributing to ‘bidding war’ as regional towns struggle to attract doctors
The story she’s sharing is from when she was around 30. She’s near 80 now. There was no shortage of rural doctors in the mid 1970s, so your complaint doesn’t even make sense.
About 10 or so doctors get struck off the register every year (of 10,000 doctors in WA), and it’s done by a thorough review process by the AHPRA. Its not like Fiona Stanley can just call a buddy and they’re gone - a whole team of people had to review the case, hear the doctor’s position in a hearing, and decide if the doctor had aggregiously failed in their duties and breached the code of conduct they’d agreed to uphold.
Discriminating doc can no longer get kids killed with negligence, and you take the position that the lady that helped flag the case for removal is “insufferable”? What a weird position to broadcast to the internet.
I disagree with the implication that a child should be left to die if the medical centre isn’t paid. I know the doctors need to be paid and their work deserves to be compensated, I know medical centres need to have costly supplies to operate, of course, but the commodification of society’s critical healthcare needs is an atrocity.
The author suggests it was the doctor’s lack of care, but if there’s some missing context that somehow justified their decision, it’s still a damning insight into paid healthcare systems. Would distributing the cost of that treatment be more or less damaging than the cost of denying it?
one less doctor
On the other hand, if they’re replaced with someone who doesn’t let patients die like that, that’s saving lives.
You fuckin wat? You never pay the doctor before treatment, this mercenary jackass deserved to be fired out of a cannon.
