This rural town has 2,000 people and, soon, not a single GP

Moura health advocates at breaking point, as rural town loses its only GP In short: Health advocates in Moura are no longer working with their local health service, with the rural town's only permanent GP leaving this week. Advocates say they've been warning for months that the doctor's workload was unsustainable. What's next? Central Queensland Hospital and Health Service says it is recruiting for medical officers and will keep working with the community. Marie Cherry is battling incurable breast cancer, and soon there might not be any doctor in town to treat her. The 82-year-old has been living in Moura, on Queensland's coal belt, for more than 50 years, and said moving away was not an option. "I'm beating it at the moment … but you do live in fear that the time when you really need [a doctor], there's not going to be one here," she said. Sitting two hours from Rockhampton, the small town has long struggled to keep its medical workforce. A single GP has been working at both the medical centre and the hospital, with support from occasional locum, or temporary, doctors. But he has now decided to leave. Rod Martin was a locum for two weeks in Moura, and is also the president of the Australian College of Rural and Remote Medicine. He said the workload was significant. "As the only doctor in town for 2,000 people … there's lots of health needs and particularly in a town like that where they hadn't had a regular doctor for quite a while, there were lots of things to try and catch up on," he said. "Increasingly, rural towns like this need more than just the one doctor to help look after the town." Former Moura resident Kyarah Williams took her nine-month-old baby to the hospital with diarrhoea and vomiting, and never saw a doctor. Ms Williams said it was "upsetting" to be sent home and told to feed her baby breast milk ice cubes. "I felt like there was no urgency in how he was assessed, there was … no sense of care at all, I was just told to go home and figure it out, pretty much." Advocate's warning Moura health advocate Debbie Elliott said she had been urging Central Queensland Hospital and Health Service to bring in more temporary doctors to support the permanent GP for months, but it never happened. "The issue was, six months prior we were saying, 'This is going to happen, you need to help us, please give support'," she said. "And there was just no response to that." Ms Elliott has been advocating on health issues in Moura for 13 years. She said she had never seen the local health service in such a dire state. Ms Elliott has resigned as chair of the local community advisory group, while the group itself has stopped working with the health service. "A lot of people are very angry because they know that we had a doctor, he wanted to stay," she said. "Now we're not going to have a doctor." In a statement, a Central Queensland Hospital and Health Service spokesperson said it was actively recruiting candidates to fill medical officer positions, and was committed to engaging with the Moura community. The town has allocated funding for two doctors, and the service says it will continue to find locum support as recruitment progresses for more permanent staff. Finding the right medicine Thirty minutes down the road, in Theodore, a private medical clinic has had more success holding on to its workers. The practice owners Elizabeth and Ben Clarkson, said training a steady stream of medical students was the key to keeping staff in the rural town. "They can come out to these rural communities and see their expanded scope of practice, and they can see a potential career,"Mr Clarkson said. Dr Clarkson said the "vast majority" of work was done in the primary care clinic, reducing the number and severity of hospital admissions. "We know that early intervention and identifying problems earlier rather than later are really important for patients," she said. "We don't want to see people when they're coming in really unwell because they haven't been able to maybe see a GP for several years." Mr Clarkson is hopeful Moura can find a unique way to attract and keep a doctor. "Keep referring to Moura as 'Mouradise',"he said. "It's a good town, they deserve a doctor."