Urgent plea: Dr Peter Nesbitt is encouraging patients to demonstrate restraint and patience when seeing medical professionals.
Photo by
Luke Hemer
Workplace resources have been stretched thin across the twin towns, and this has had a significant impact on our local medical staff.
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Dr Peter Nesbitt of Echuca Moama Family Medical Practice said doctors, nurses and reception staff in the clinic had been subjected to the frustrations and anger of patients.
“We had a patient who was really quite rude to one of our doctors totally unnecessarily — based on racial grounds — and we’ve had other patients who have done similar sorts of things,” he said.
Dr Nesbitt has given a list of reasons why patients could be acting out of frustration, but cites a stretched medical system as the primary cause.
He said the numbers of doctors entering the general practitioners training programs has lessened over the years, resulting in fewer numbers of trained GPs going to regional areas.
Combined with senior experienced GPs retiring or leaving the profession, the rise in Echuca-Moama’s population in recent years, and COVID-19 isolation periods, it has created a perfect storm for limited appointment availability.
“A couple of years ago, maybe five years ago, getting an appointment was never a problem — we had enough doctors in town to service the amount of patients that we have,” he said.
“Now it can be two to three weeks before they can make a routine appointment, and sometimes it can be seven or eight weeks to see the doctor they choose to see.”
Dr Nesbitt also referenced the intense pressure on our hospital, ambulance and outpatient services when trying to meet demand.
“The problem is when you put pressure on general practice, those patients turn up in the emergency department, and they get frustrated because they have to wait many many hours, because the system is at capacity,” he said.
“That doesn’t even include the ambulance ramping and pressures that service is under as well.
“We have limited beds, and when you’re trying to make beds, you’re trying to send people home as early as possible, and we have to use more and more of our outpatient services, like Hospital In The Home, and outpatient nursing services, which again puts more pressure on.
“The whole system is under enormous pressure at the moment.”
While the faults within our current medical system are being exposed, Dr Nesbitt is not optimistic about a solution in the coming years.
“I suspect that there will be a number of doctors that are well established that will be retiring soon,” he said.
“We have to try and train up some young doctors to replace them, but when there are fewer that are entering the training programs, it really makes it very hard to see how this situation is going to improve.
“When you don’t have enough senior doctors to supervise, it’s very hard to be training the registrars, the interns and the medical students that come through our practices each year. It will impact on the next generation.”
Dr Peter Nesbitt: ‘I hate it when I hear that one of our doctors or our reception staff have been abused by someone.’
Photo by
Luke Hemer
The message that Dr Nesbitt has for patients and residents is clear: be respectful.
“I hate it when I hear that one of our doctors or our reception staff have been abused by someone, because all of our staff are trying hard,” he said.
“The bottom line is if people are frustrated with the system, there are lots of reasons why that might be the case, but if there is poor behaviour, rudeness or abuse, we won’t tolerate that at all.
“If people really have poor behaviour, and they are not respectful to other patients and staff in the practices, we would recommend that that person finds another doctor — and in this climate it’s very hard to find another practice.
“We understand that people are frustrated, but they also have to understand that if they want to behave that way, then they will be asked to go somewhere else.”
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