Associate Professor Steve Trumble MD Dip RACOG FRACGP

Name: Associate Professor Steve Trumble

Career stage: Consultant

Location: Melbourne

Position:

Medical Specialty: General Practice

What is special, unique or different about General Practice?

GP is the only specialty that let’s you get so close to your patients to really understand what’s going on with their problems. Everything else strikes me as quite superficial. It’s a unique perspective and one that’s really very privileged.

What are the great things about specialising in General Practice?

For me it’s about breadth and depth. Maybe I get bored easily, but I find that in a day in general practice you’re never bored; people bring such a range of problems to you and if you wish, you can go into a great deal of depth with those problems and actually try to help solve them.

What’s been most surprising about General Practice?

I guess the level of science underpinning it - as a student there was a perception that general practice was a fairly superficial discipline. When you get involved you realise that in fact the things you do as a GP are very much evidence-based and build on research that’s been done all around the world in order to inform what we do.

How has General Practice challenged or stimulated you intellectually?

It’s always interesting when you go back to your 10/20 year reunions and talk to your colleagues - friends from medical school who are doing other disciplines. A lot of them are no longer challenged because they’re doing the same thing every day. There’s nothing more challenging than having to think on your feet, and certainly in general practice you’re always being challenged to come up with some solution for a problem you’ve never seen before. And which maybe nobody’s ever seen before. Even if it’s a patient you know well you’re dealing with new issues all the time. The challenge of dealing with different things every day, that’s stimulating.

How has General Practice exceeded your expectations?

I guess in the flexibility of the career. I still see myself as a general practioner although I’m primarily a medical education academic in a university. So this afternoon I go to my practice and see patients,; tomorrow I’m back at the university, teaching. In terms of expectations, I didn’t expect to have quite such a flexible and varied lifestyle at this stage of my career.

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