I'm Sarah Larkins, I'm a GP, a General Practitioner and my day job is Associate Dean Research
at the College of Medicine and Dentistry here at JCU.
I actually moved up from Melbourne and chose to come up to North Queensland to go GP training
because I was really interested in Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander health and wanted
to do that so I did, I actually did two advanced special skills as part of my training and
one of them was Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander health but one of them was an academic
GP registrar post. So an academic post AST is a usually done
as a twelve month post on a half time basis where a registrar is engaged half time within
usually an academic department of general practice in a university and during that time
they are engaged in teaching, usually teaching medical students and teaching design, usually
involved in conducting a research project and mentored by an experienced GP academic.
As part of my training I actually came on to conduct with a team of researchers a national
study experiences of GP registrars in terms of educational and personal problems that
they might've experienced and so it was a large survey study, national study and then
also a small interview component with registrars who'd experienced problems. So it was for
me at that time a steep learning curve but I really benefited from mentor-ship from senior
academic researchers and I learnt so much about research processes through conducting
that work. I think most medical graduates and junior
doctors get very little training in how practically to conduct a research project. So that's number
really useful thing. You'll normally come out of it with a academic publication or two
which is really useful. You'll get skills, gain skills in teaching students and how to
design teaching, teaching resources and the important thing is whether or not you go onto
an academic career or not, those are all skills you can take on to you subsequent career know
matter what you do. RACGP and ACRRM registrars are able to do
an academic post either as part of their regular GP training in the case of RACGP registrars
or as part of rural training. It's just a written application process normally
done in conjunction with your local academic department and your local GMT team.
So in terms of the duration most registrars will do it over twelve months. But the academic
post component of it is actually half time and then GP half the times in general practice.
There's progress reports. I think there's two over the course of the post and an academic
registrar will have regular feedback with their mentor about their teaching in order
to improve their own teaching skills and also will be expected to complete their research
and produce conference presentations or perhaps a publication as a result of that research
work. You can expect to be embedded for at least
half your time in an academic department of general practice at the universities. That
means participating fully in the life of the department. So you know there'll be some meetings,
some teaching, some time to sit and read articles about your area of research interest. You
can expect to be doing general practice part of the time and you can also expected to be
linked up to a network of other academic GP registrars around the country.
I think you'll have a stronger skill set if you do something where population health is
particularly important so you know rural practice or Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander health
and in addition you have a whole suite of special skills which equip you to go on and
do more teaching work or more research work. In terms of keeping active with research,
there's the mini minor version if you like whereby you're active in clinical practice
and keep reaching articles, critically appraising them, attending conferences, thinking about
research reading research. There's the sort of intermediate model where you might be conducting
some small research projects in your practice but still focusing largely on clinically practice
or there's sort of the rolls royce model if you like where you move full time into academic
practice, stay current through doing lots of research and producing lots of publications
and mentoring others in research and also keep a little bit of clinical practice going.
They're not necessarily the most structured of posts, there's a lot of self-directed learning
involved so you need to be comfortable with that but if you're interested in learning
a little bit more about research, learning a little bit more about teaching and combining
that with a clinical career and like that little bit of flexibility and self-directed
learning then it's perfect for you. I found it really rewarding, I enjoyed the
whole process of conducting a research project. I enjoyed the collegial nature of talking
with other academics about research and with clinicians and service providers and I felt
fairly passionate about the potential for studying how things work and how we can make
things work better as a means of improving the way health systems work for everyone so
I think I took all those things away and was able to see a lot more potential which I've
been able to build on subsequently.