WHEN Jackie Wu started his medicine career, he was convinced he wanted to spend his professional career in the community where he grew up.
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But the south-west Sydney native spent 16 months in Bathurst with Western Sydney University's School of Rural Medicine program and that all changed.
He said his initial spell in Bathurst, from June 2019 to June 2020, was "the first time I went anywhere considered rural".
"It was a fun experience out here, with a solid group of friends from the clinical school," he said.
"I felt the engagement with the community at a level you couldn't get at the metro level, in terms of the hospital community and the community at large. I would bump into a patient at trivia after treating them at ED.
"When they offered us the chance to stay here and do this assistance in medicine, I got to stick around, up-skill and spend four months in ED.
"That was a total of 16 months and two Bathurst winters."
Pursuing a career in anaesthetics
AFTER finishing his four-year degree, he headed off to work in Sydney, but now he's back at the Bathurst Hospital as a registrar.
It's a one-year contract that will last from February 2024 to February 2025, where he will spend half a year in the intensive care unit (ICU) and then the next half in anaesthetic.
Being a registrar means Mr Wu has a higher level of responsibility compared with someone who's just graduated.
Some people can decide to stay on as a registrar after their 12 months is up, but he can't count his time as official.
As he wants to pursue a career in anaesthetics, he's limited in Bathurst because there's no training program for that, so he'll have to complete training somewhere else.
Ideally, he prefers his home of south-west Sydney, but he's keen on the idea of still working in Bathurst one way or another.
"It's hard to get rid of that south-west Sydney," the Bankstown native said.
"When you work in one hospital, you tend to disperse yourself across the hospitals in the district - Campbelltown, Liverpool, Bankstown.
"Usually, if you practice there, you'll practice at multiple hospitals. That's where I grew up and that's where I want to be based, but given Bathurst is my proper second home now, this is a place where I want to do something once a month or once every couple of weeks."
A strange time during COVID-19
MR Wu has experienced it all when it comes to COVID-19.
When he was first based at Bathurst, he saw the early days of COVID-19, where there was a rise in vigilance, but there had been no community transmission yet.
"It was essentially a time of some policy changes, but overall, from a medical school experience, it wasn't too much of a culture shock," he said.
"It was basically everything I expected to do in an internship."
But come his time based at Liverpool, where there was a rise in the Delta variant of COVID-19, it was an eye-opener.
"I was based at Liverpool and we transitioned to ward-based care," he said.
"I saw pre-COVID, right in the thick of things, and now we've sort of come out the other side. It's still a thing, but not as bad."
About the Bathurst Clinical School
BATHURST is one of the two important hubs - Lismore is the other - for Western Sydney University's School of Rural Medicine program.
The School of Medicine's Bathurst Rural Clinical School (BRCS) has been running since 2010 and is a comprehensive clinical training program.
Bathurst provides clinical training places for MD students in their fourth and fifth years of training across a number of disciplines.
The rural placements are continuous over 12 months and, as such, are aligned with national rural health workforce priorities.
