Dr. Rebecca Quake

Name: Dr. Rebecca Quake

Career stage: Registrar

Location: Melbourne

Position:

Medical Specialty: General Practice

How has General Practice exceeded your expectations?

I think as a medical student I thought it was all coughs and colds and medical certificates and referring off to a specialist, but that was early in my days of medical student years and then I did placements with General Practioners and I saw some of the best medicine that I’d seen in my entire training and that’s continued throughout my training program, that you see people first off when they haven’t been examined and prodded by every other doctor in the hospital so you see some great medicine that you don’t see in other places.

How has General Practice challenged or stimulated you intellectually?

It’s the breadth of knowledge that you need in General Practice that is always the challenge in that you need to be knowledgeable about all areas in medicine and be able to deal with whatever comes through the door. And so that is always an intellectual stretch, in that you need to deal with those areas that you might not like all that much or be particularly interested in. And then it’s the academia, being involved in research and the challenge of developing a research project, which I have never done before and it’s proved very challenging and certainly, intellectually, the reading of literature and assessing and evaluating that literature is one of the most challenging things I’ve done.

What is special, unique or different about General Practice?

It’s definitely the variety, the opportunity to do something new and different every day and have a change in focus most days of the week and that’s what I enjoy and that’s what makes it perfect for me.

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