General News
20 February, 2022
Warracknabeal clinic welcomes first female GP
A WARRACKNABEAL clinic has welcomed the first female general practitioner to Yarriambiack Shire in the hopes to improve access to rural health services.
A WARRACKNABEAL clinic has welcomed the first female general practitioner to Yarriambiack Shire in the hopes to improve access to rural health services, particularly women.
Wheatfields Family Medical has recruited Dr Kristina Cruz to start work as a part-time general practitioner at the clinic from February 7.
She will make the 40 minute journey from Horsham to Warracknabeal after most recently working as one of the emergency department medical officers at Wimmera Health Care Group where she started back in February 2020.
The Phillipines-born doctor, fluent in English and Filipino, graduated from Philippines University of Santo Tomas in 2004 and has gone on to work in emergency departments, as a cruise ship doctor, a medical educator and medevac doctor for the private medical company International SOS.
An invitation from a friend that would see her make the journey to Australia where she started working in the emergency department at Canterbury Hospital, NSW from 2017 until making the move to the Wimmera with her family.
Dr Cruz said she was invited to practice in Warracknabeal by the clinic’s sole practitioner Dr Franklin Butuyuyu to help address the doctor shortage in the district.
“From some stroke of luck, Dr. Franklin got a copy of my CV and invited me over to practice here because I was told that there's no female doctor here and he's quite loaded with a lot of patients,” she said.
Dr Cruz has high hopes to apply her interests in emergency and family medicine as well as women’s health to patients in the district, particularly women, who she said have been looking for a female doctor.
“I've had patients recently that told me they have been delayed because there's no female doctor and they're more comfortable with seeing a female doctor for that so I'm actually very happy to start that ball rolling for most of the females here,” she said.
“I'm very interested in female health and I'm starting to do a lot of preventative medicine here for female cervical screening.
“Some of the teenagers and some of the middle aged people here say that they're very stressed and they would want to speak to another doctor about it and they know that Franklin is very busy so when I heard that, I said maybe they really need another doctor here.
“He told me there's a lot of jobs that we have to do here and there won't be a day that you won't be busy because a lot of people need doctors, not just for illnesses but preventative medicine as well to prevent an illness from occurring and that takes another person or maybe two three more doctors to do for the whole town, and not even the whole town he says.”
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Dr Cruz is currently in the process of getting accredited to admit patients to Rural Northwest Health.
But preventative care will be her primary focus after years on the frontline as an emergency medical worker.
“Primarily when I was in Horsham, I realized how much a rural place needs doctors because I would always hear from my patients that, ‘before I can see a doctor or GP, it takes me two weeks or three weeks,’ and I said really?” she said.
“I thought maybe not just being in ED, because ED can sometimes be depressing: you see them when they're not stable anymore and very very sick, I thought maybe I'll see them when they're well and prevent that from happening.”