Rural questions – a long way from all things metropolitan
Jan 15, 2025
Almost all medical college curricula are national. Sounds obvious, until you consider what that means in practice!
Australia is an enormous country. Practising in inner city Sydney is chalk and cheese to practising in Kununurra, 3042km away from Perth. The conditions that you see will be different, but perhaps most importantly how you manage your patients will be completely different. You might not have local lab or imaging services, and you might not have a hospital on your doorstep, which means you might have to look after more acutely unwell patients than your metro counterparts until you can transfer definitively.
Rural doctors know all of this too well, but the KFP tests rural questions almost every single exam – whether you are a rural doctor or not. This poses an issue for our metro colleagues.
So how does this play out in the exam?
These questions often follow a predictable pattern:
- Firstly, they usually involve an element of transfer out to a hospital.
- Secondly, there is an emphasis on the management of an acute presentation whilst waiting for that transfer.
- Third, those acute presentations usually tend to be predictable (but not always).
- Fourth, even if you have no idea on what the actual diagnosis is, you can easily score 60-80% of the marks just by knowing and reciting a set of common management principles, which you can tweak for your scenario.
Intrigued? You should be!
Want to find out more? Hop on board as we take a journey through (almost) every mish-mash of rurality that exists.
