There’s one key reason female GPs like me are quitting

August 28, 2026 — 7:30pm

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The federal government has announced that 84.1 per cent of visits to general practitioners are now bulk billed, and has called that progress. The figure counts the doctors who’ve stayed in the profession. After 13 years, I am not one of them.

About four years ago, a patient walked into my consulting room struggling – she told me that much. What she could not yet tell me was that she had a specific plan to end her life, and the means to carry it out. She came back recently to tell me that because of the time and kindness of that first appointment, her children have a mother today.

I have thought about that a great deal. Not with pride, but with the weight of it. She was not describing anything exceptional that I did. She was describing what becomes possible when a GP makes enough time to sit with a person. To notice. To make someone feel that they are worth an hour of another human being’s unhurried attention. That is not a luxury. That is general practice.

I am not leaving because I want to. It is the vigilance of never being allowed to miss anything. It is the patient distress carried home. It is the unpaid hours that continue after the last patient has gone. And it is all of that inside a system whose government will not acknowledge, in anything but words, what a good GP is worth. I have been filling the gap between the care I refuse to compromise on and the support I receive to provide it – with my own time,........

© The Sydney Morning Herald