Welcome to Broome Docs

Welcome to Broome Docs, this site is intended to provide a single source of up-to-date educational material for country doctors.

Country docs are “jacks of all trades”, GPs, Anaesthetists, part-time intensivists, O&G, Paeds, Psych ….  basically the doctors in the country who have to deal with whatever rolls in the door.

I am a Broome Doc, working in the town of Broome – NW Western Australia.  As you can see, Broome is a long way from pretty  much anywhere.  Over the years I have found my best ëducation” has come from those hallway meetings with my colleagues where we think through the difficult, urgent or ”out-there” medicine that we see on a day to day basis.  I work with a great team of doctors, we are all true generalists and often struggle with trying to manage some pretty specialist medicine in our small hospital.  Broome is becoming a secondary referral hospital for the whole NW and this means we are seeing more and more sick people.  Our population is pretty unique – about half our patients are Kimberley Aboriginal peoples with a lot of disease burden rarely seen in the 1st world.  At other times (the dry) we become the defacto hospital for a large travelling population of ‘grey nomads’, the “victory lap” crew or as one of my colleagues call it – SAD syndrome (See Australia and Die).  The “tyranny of distance” becomes acutely evident when the closest definitive care for our patients is often 2500 km south (often a 12 hour turn around on a good day!)  On bad days we become a poor man’s ICU, CCU, you name it…(we have the only CT scanner within a days drive )

….did I mention the croc attacks, 3 of the 4 most venomous snakes, frequent cyclones, poisonous jellyfish and temperatures over 100 F every day (tourists beware!)

The aim of this site is to provide a single place for all you time-poor doctors to come and get quality education, clinical tips and interact with one another without having to search all over the internet.  I also hope to bring you a series of mini-lectures from specialists who deal with the things we see once or twice a year every daÿ!  As a busy GP I am more than happy to stand on the shoulders of academic giants, I find the good ones have a great way of keeping the complex simple – just the way I like it.

I hope this site can expand this brain pool of rural doctors – please feel free to leave comments on the cases and posts presented – we can all learn from one another – no matter how far we are from the really smart guys in the big centres.  There is a lot of good stuff out there, but it takes a long time to sort the quality gems from the rest – we can do it for you and save you a lot of time!

Enjoy

Casey