My Rural Story | Week Nine | Janie Dade-Smith

involved. It was then that I realised how little I knew and how much I had to learn. That changed my life course in many ways. I’ve worked for the college of GPs for four years down in Melbourne and wrote their Aboriginal curriculum and have been really involved in that ever since. I also an my own consulting business for seven years but now I’m working at Bond University as a Professor of Innovations in Medical Education.

bit like doing a pap smear in Melbourne on a patient or doing one in a remote community. In a remote community that person might be your next door neighbour, your kid’s best friend’s mother, those sorts of things. So, it’s a very different context and the context changes everything about a normal situation. Rural and remote people see the world and know the world in different ways to metropolitan people. They are often more resourceful in terms of access to services, how they actually go about their daily living, those sorts of things. Distance isn’t seen as a problem, ‘oh, it’s only four hours drive down the road mate, it’ll be right’, that sort of attitude. That’s quite acceptable and they’re used to not having the same sort of facilities and access to services as metropolitan people have. I think as a rural person, I never thought that I was any different from a metropolitan person, I thought

What is different about working in rural and remote areas?

There are two main things. One’s about the content, the sorts of things everybody does to work as a doctor or a nurse or an allied health professional in a rural or remote or urban area and the other one is about the context. The context changes everything about a normal situation. It’s a

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