THE BIGGEST change in general practice in Kiernan Halliburton's career spanning five decades has been the hands-on, holistic approach to care. The constant was his dedication to offer families the best care in trying to look after them as much as possible.
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As a young general practitioner, Dr Halliburton's life revolved about his patients in an era when GPs were on-call, doing house calls, delivering babies and making their morning and evening hospital rounds.
The juggle was difficult with his own young family in Ballarat, but Dr Halliburton said his wife knew while work was not the first priority, they had to be flexible - and she was incredibly tolerant.
Dr Halliburton, who has treated four generations of many Ballarat families, is retiring with a global pandemic now seemingly "a bit more understandable and manageable" and in a healthcare industry flooded with medical specialists.
The proud all-rounder turned 70 in August and felt this was a rounded age milestone in which to start a new chapter dominated by his passion for do-it-yourself renovation and building projects about his home.
"Your involvement in families [as a GP], the most important thing you can do is provide care for them, knowing the family members, their networks and support processes of them," Dr Halliburton said.
"In some families, I delivered two of these generations as babies and follow their lives. A nice part of the job is when it feels like a patient has just left the room and their next visit they come back and you just continue the conversation where you left off.
"When I left, the cards and gifts patients brought in was overwhelming, reading the words of how much I had meant to them."
Dr Halliburton started his practice in the early 1970s with Dr Bob Brownfield and Dr Sandy Murray in their popular Mair Street clinic, before moving to a state-of-the-art clinic in Alfredton in 2014.
Dr Halliburton said it was a sad day when GPs were phased out of hospital rounds. He felt it was important to manage his patients in their sickest times, calling for a specialist when needed in a time when there were not many in Ballarat.
Even being a football club doctor, in his case for Sebastopol, often meant taking injured players back to the surgery to set simple fractures or, if needed, working with an anaesthetist to set fractures in the hospital.
This is a world now dominated by orthopaedic surgeons on a Monday morning.
Such as shift to increasing specialisation and frozen GP wages has created a contracting pool of doctors choosing to specialise in general practice.
Dr Halliburton said the costs of running a practice had increased about 25 to 30 per cent in the period since Medicare payments to GPs were frozen in 2016 - not even rising with the consumer price index.
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"You hear the government saying GPs are at the coalface...but if the government doesn't realise what's going into it, why would a person go into general practice," Dr Halliburton said. "It is much more lucrative now to specialise. If you do look at a wage structure of a career that has been neglected for so long - and who knows when it might change - why would you do it."
But Dr Halliburton has loved the multi-skilled juggle in caring for his patients, even the housecalls before outpatient emergency departments came into play.
He has also relished the change in technology, particularly computers as a game-changer in patient care as a record-keeper and "best friend" for better understanding checks and balances in the fast-evolving and increasingly complex prescription drug industry.
Dr Halliburton hangs up his stethoscope with particular gratitude to the team at the front desk of Alfredton Medical Centre, who he said played an important frontline team role in patient care.
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