RMA25 - GPSA competition winner's experience
Dr Dana Fitzsimmons was the beneficiary of the GPSA Competition for a registration to the RMA Conference.
Our CEO, Bruce Argyle, spoke with her on Day 3 of RMA25 about her role in the NT, her impressions and learnings from the conference.
In January 2006 Dana moved to the NT as an intern and never left. She was part of the first
cohort of medical students from Flinders University to go out to remote communities (2001).
She now works for NT Health, providing RG services to the Milikapiti community on the Tiwi
Islands. She supervises 9 GP Registrars and 2 RMO’s and on the RACGP Council.
Dana acknowledged that she had to juggle a few things to get to RMA – swapping days with
colleagues so the community is still supported as well as deferring some work and writing a
grant application during the conference.
Dana shared with me that she came to ‘find my people’ – other RG’s working in remote
settings and understand the context and pressures. The program looked great – and has
proved to be just that. It has been excellent for networking to help progress towards having
focussed and embedded training programs for GPs and Registrars in the NT.
She went on to say that she has found all the GPSA resources to be of the highest quality and that they
have helped her significantly with the management of Registrars in difficult situations.
I came here hoping to finds some people and I’ve done just that … it has been very exciting. Thanks to GPSA.