My Rural Story | Week 2 | Corey Stone

AUSTRALIA’S RURAL, REMOTE AND INDIGENOUS HEALTH #MyRuralStory

Featuring Interviews from the brand new 3rd edition of Australia’s Rural, Remote and Indigenous Health by Janie Dade Smith

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-Week Two -

C orey Stone Second Year Medical Student - Bond University

Corey Stone

I’m Corey Stone, I’m 26 years old and I’m a second year medical student at Bond University. Prior to studying medicine, I studied commerce. I did majors in accounting and finance and I worked in that industry up in Brisbane for two years. I’ve lived in the city my whole life so I hadn’t really had much exposure to rural or remote lifestyle until I went up to Kununurra. In my first year of med school I took the opportunity to participate in a student philanthropic trip out to Kununurra where we spent two weeks with the local kids running, or assisting, an organisation called Save The Children with a holiday program. During the holiday program, we organised

sporting activities for them, cooking classes, boys nights, girls nights, lots of sports - they love their sports out there. I have to say, it was the most eye opening experience I’ve had inmywhole life, seeing the difference, the contrast between rural and remote and metropolitan and city lifestyles and it probably was the most rewarding two weeks of my life.

What is different about working in rural and remote areas?

Working in Kununurra, in a remote community, is incredibly different to working in a metropolitan area. There’s a real sense of community out

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‘There’s a real sense of community out in these rural areas that you don’t get in the city.’

in these rural areas that you don’t get in the city. There’s a genuine care for one another that I’ve never experienced before. Everyone knows each other’s business, but in a good way, they’re looking out for each other. You also get to know people a lot quicker. I only spent two weeks out in Kununurra but I built some incredible relationships whilst out there and I feel like I really had an influence on some people’s lives while I was there, even though I was only there for a short amount of time. And I don’t think that sort of thing happens, or is as likely to happen, in the city as it is out there. What advice would you give to students going on a rural or remote placement? Going out with an awareness that things are very different out there. Resources aren’t as easy to come by as they are here. Everyone knows each other’s business, but in a good way, they’re looking out for each other. In the city we take for granted just being able to walk down to the shops and pick up a newspaper and that sort of thing. But, it’s not like that out there. We have a great understanding of what’s good for us and what’s not

good for us and, in my experience, out there they don’t have that same level of understanding and education. So, I asked kids a simple question like ‘name for me two green vegetables’ they couldn’t name two green vegetables which was quite astounding for me. Again, having an appreciation for education is key. Out in this area the absentee rate is something around 90% so these kids aren’t going to school and they don’t appreciate the importance of education. So I think going out with an open mind and appreciating that there are these differences in these communities is very, very important. What has been one of your best experiences working in these remote communities? My best experience working out in Kununurra is also quite a sad story. We were playing basketball one day with a group of kids. They were all aged between six and 15 and one of the eight

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year old girls got hit on the back of the leg with a rugby ball and she started crying. We couldn’t work out why, the ball didn’t hit her that hard and she wouldn’t explain to us what happened. She turned around and she was bleeding quite profusely from the back of her leg through her shorts, but we couldn’t really touch her to see what was there. So, we took her to the Elder and asked her ‘what can we do? Something needs to be done.’ The Elder said to us, well, she didn’t really say to us, she said to the girl ‘just go home’. We had been to this girls house the previous day and she lived in a tin hut out on the reservationandwe knewthat noone would be home and that the home wasn’t

a sterile, safe environment for her, so we ended up taking her inside to the nurse and she dressed the wound up and gave her some pain killers for children and after that she was fine. She was running around on the basketball court and she was happy. It was a very rewarding thing for me, seeing that the girl was helped rather than sent back to her house where nothing could be done, and nothing would be done, and it got infected. So while it was really sad to see that that’s how they deal with those issues out there, it was also very rewarding to know that we were able to create a positive outcome for that girl.

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What have you experienced in remote Australia that has changed your world view? The experience that really changed my world view when we went out to Kununurra was when we set up this scavenger hunt and I set up what was called the ‘Education Station’. The kids would come around in groups and I had a little blackboard set up and I would ask them some general knowledge questions that someone in their age range would be able to answer for me. So, I’d ask the 15 year old kids something like ‘what’s 7 x 7’ or ‘name two pieces of fruit’ and it was astounding, they couldn’t

answer these basic questions for me. The first thing I asked them was ‘how old are you?’ so that I knewwhat sort of general questions to ask them. But the question I really should have asked them is ‘how many days a week do you go to school?’. It was a real ‘aha’moment for me because I didn’t realise that they didn’t go to school, these kids, or they went to school once a year or once a term. So that reallymademe wake up and realise how lucky we are here to have such a big emphasis on education and how good our education is here. They don’t have those facilities available to them out there and there’s not people telling them to go to school and telling them how important education is.

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Featuring Interviews from the brand new 3rd edition of Australia’s Rural, Remote and Indigenous Health by Janie Dade Smith

Share your rural experience now to win a copy of the book @ElsevierAUS #MyRuralStory Please note, the transcripts featured within this publication have been taken from live interviews. Any alterations have been made for the purpose of clarity and do not change the overall meaning of the speaker.

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