GP AUSTRALIA

Dr Marek Steiner

Six weeks after Marek Steiner had completed his training and received a provider numberfrom Medicare, he opened the doors on his own solo GP practice in Sydney’s inner-west.

Two years later, he has started building his purpose-built clinic for four GPs and numerous visiting allied health professionals – and the new practice will open mid-2010.

He believes most students don’t realise that only the last five percent of medicine happens in hospitals, while the majority of medicine is done outside.

Although Marek enjoyed the range of terms he went through as a junior doctor at Nepean hospital, he couldn’t wait to leave. “I didn’t like the hospital system in general, although I enjoyed the work. I didn’t like the bureaucracy and the shift work and the fact that I wasn’t really in control, I was always being told what to do.” He did enjoy the close-knit teams in hospitals, sometimes hard to find in General Practice.

“A GP needs a variety of personal and clinical skills. You never know what will be required and how much time you need to devote to an appointment. And you need to listen to patients because what they seem to be asking is not always the actual question that deep down, they need an answer for.”
When Marek graduated, his wife (a corporate manager with an MBA) left her job to help him establish a solo practice. The couple fitted out a former convenience store with two consultation rooms and a treatment room in Breakfast Point, a suburb of Sydney.

“It can be a bit daunting by yourself, there are financial risks, and you wonder if you’re going to get patients – but it’s worked out really well.” But within a month after the practice opened, Marek’s days were fully booked out. Since the practice opened two years ago, it has grown to three GPs, with visiting allied health professionals including a podiatrist, a psychologist and a paediatrician. Building approvals for his new clinic are going through Council at the moment, he adds.

“Four GPs will be perfect because we want to remain a community family General Practice,” he says. “I don’t really want to lose touch with that personal interaction with patients, but the good thing will be expanding on the other services, like podiatry and physio.”

With four GPs in the practice, the range of specialty interests expands significantly. “I’m interested in antenatal care, paediatrics, musculoskeletal medicine, preventative health, travel medicine and e-health, so I’ve tried to make my practice as paper-free as possible.”

As a GP, Marek Steiner has managed to retain his entrepreneurial interests while practicing community-based medicine with long-term patients. He’s also recreated his favourite part of the hospital system (the close-knit team of health professionals) – all without the bureaucracy and lack of control that he so disliked.

Case study contributed by General Practice Registrars Australia www.gpra.org.au