By hook or by crook, the residents of a north Queensland town have not only kept their local practice running but almost tripled its size.
When Mareeba resident Ross Cardillo approached the town GP, Dr Grant Manypeney, with an offer to purchase and run the local GP clinic as a non-profit social enterprise, he got a no-frills warning.
“I remember Grant shook my hand and he said, ‘Good luck, Ross’,” Mr Cardillo said.
“‘Good luck ever attracting any more doctors to Mareeba.’
“So that was two-and-a-half full-time equivalents when he had the practice. We’ve now increased that to six.”
Mareeba itself is an MM4 town in a shire of the same name, located about 60 kilometres northwest of Cairns.
Originally a tobacco-growing town, Mr Cardillo told The Medical Republic that it had “been through some big changes” over the decades.
In 2017, after a reduction in services at the Mareeba hospital, the town came up with the idea to create a medical service akin to the old-style hospital boards.
“[In those days], the board was made up of prominent members of the community that wanted to get things done,” Mr Cardillo said.
“We had that idea, and after doing a lot of research we decided to actually pursue that model, and we set up a not-for-profit social enterprise charity called Mareeba and Communities Family Healthcare.”
The group bought the Mareeba Medical Clinic from Dr Manypeney in 2020.
“He [wasn’t] getting any younger, he was looking towards retirement and couldn’t find anybody to buy him out,” Mr Cardillo, who chairs the nonprofit, said.
“We made him an offer where we purchased the practice from him and we’d run the practice and recruit the doctors, and he could just concentrate on seeing patients.”
Mr Cardillo set about recruiting new GPs by hook, crook and any other means.
First came two internationally trained doctors from Egypt.
“I made them feel very welcome, as has our community,” he said.
“And they’ve actually purchased a property and had a daughter, so they’re not going anywhere, they’re staying in Mareeba.”
Next, Mr Cardillo tracked down a former resident who he remembered presenting a high school award to.
“She’d become a doctor and moved down to Victoria, so I rang her up and I said to her, ‘why don’t you come home?’” Mr Cardillo said.
“And she said, ‘Well, can you give me a job?’
“I said, ‘Yep’, she said, ‘Alright, I’ll come home’. So, she’s come back.”
When he learned that there was a doctor living a few towns over in Speewah, Mr Cardillo recruited her, too.
“I’m always looking for doctors,” he said.
“Everyone I talk to, I’m always trying to encourage people to move to Mareeba and be a doctor.”
The town’s practice has now expanded to a secondary outreach clinic further west, near the towns of Dimbulah and Mutchilba.
Even with another overseas-trained GP registrar locked in, Mr Cardillo has not slowed his search.
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“I’ve got another guy who used to pick fruit here, and he’s a doctor operating up in Torres,” Mr Cardillo said.
“He’s on $3000 a day, right? So, I rang him up and I said, ‘Why don’t you come back? We’ll set you up out of Dimbulah.’
“He said, ‘No, I’ve got other things to do’.
“Then I rang his father-in-law, because his wife’s just had the second baby, so I said to his father-in-law, ‘if he comes home, I can give him a job’.
“So now I’ve got the father-in-law and the mother [on side], and we’re working on him coming home.”
The practice itself is mixed billing, with most appointments attracting a gap fee. Any profits are reinvested into healthcare services for the local communities.
“I don’t want whatever we’ve started to fall over,” Mr Cardillo said.
“It’s got to keep going, and the way we’ve structured things, it will, because we’re not relying on funding so much.
“We’re getting external sources of income through grants and our income from the clinic.”
Mareeba and Communities Family Healthcare also runs the Black Cockatoo Foundation, a registered charity promoting mental health treatment, established in honour of former Mareeba GP Dr Mark Bestmann.
Dr Bestmann died by suicide in 2016. He was known around town for nursing injured black cockatoos back to health.
“With the Black Cockatoo, we run suicide prevention workshops, we run kitchen tea round tables,” Mr Cardillo said.
“We’ve got a whole network of people that are trained mental health champions in our community.”
A recent gala held in the town raised $30,000 for the charity.
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Doctors4doctors crisis support hotline: 1300 374 377
Lifeline: 13 11 14
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