Making a lasting impact for rural medical students

'I wanted to leave a gift that would allow this rural access work to continue longer term, knowing that it's a huge need and something that can continue to happen even if I'm not around.'

These days, Associate Professor Lara Fuller plays a key role in encouraging Deakin students to embark on a rewarding career in rural medicine.

But the clinical educator admits her own journey to become a GP wasn’t a straightforward one. In fact, she originally planned to avoid general practice and focus on an entirely different specialty, before a life-changing overseas experience transformed her perspective.

Having completed her second year as a graduate doctor, Associate Professor Fuller and her husband, Dr Dave Fuller, made a decision to pause their training in Melbourne for a year and journey to Nepal.

'It was working in that environment, which was a GP-run rural hospital about nine hours from Kathmandu in the Middle Hills of Nepal, that I realised just what a GP can really do, and I loved it,' Associate Professor Fuller says.

Associate Professor Fuller established a successful career as a GP in Geelong, before being encouraged to join Deakin’s School of Medicine, which welcomed its first cohort of students to the Geelong Waurn Ponds Campus in 2008.

'I was working part-time as a GP and having a young family, and the Deakin School of Medicine was announced right on our doorstep, so that was a great opportunity and I was really interested to get involved in teaching,' Associate Professor Fuller recalls.

'I think I hadn’t quite realised that I had a bit of a passion for teaching and that as soon as I started doing it, I just loved it and that really connected with me. I just got more and more involved in the teaching.'

For several years, Associate Professor Fuller juggled her roles as a GP and as an academic, before choosing to focus on teaching and research.

Today, Associate Professor Fuller is the Director of Rural Medical Education and Deakin’s Rural Community Clinical School (RCCS). The RCCS provides small numbers of students with a rich, immersive rural clinical experience. The hope is that many of them will choose to practice in rural areas upon graduation – an acute need for many smaller communities.

'It’s a very different learning model,' Associate Professor Fuller explains. 'It’s not a lecture hall with 200 students. In the Rural Community Clinical School, each year we only have 20 students. I love that part of my work and getting to journey with them through the year, it’s been fantastic. You get to know them quite well.'

One of Associate Professor Fuller’s former RCCS students was the late Dr Damion Drapac, in whose memory the Damion Drapac Centre for Equity in Health Education has recently been established.

Having worked closely with Michael Drapac, Damion’s father, to establish the priorities and goals of the Centre, Associate Professor Fuller was motivated to think about her own legacy and recently included a bequest in her Will to Deakin.

This gift in her Will is a donation made as part of Lara and Dave’s financial estate planning. It’s a wonderful and generous way to make a difference in an area they’ve been passionate about during their lifetime. Their gift will focus on equity – providing scholarships to First Nations students and students from rural areas.

'I want to leave gifts to things that are important to me and things that are reflective of what I’ve worked on during my life and what’s been important to us as a couple,' Associate Professor Fuller says.

'And I wanted to leave a gift that would allow this rural access work to continue longer term, knowing that it’s a huge need and something that can continue to happen even if I’m not around.'