belindas36

Moved here with my young family from Melbourne 3 years ago hoping to establish quality family life as a country doctor. Beyond disappointing. Have seen only a community entrenched in the failures of inept governance with no hope of change. Unemployment has been a problem for decades here. Now it’s beyond a problem… there are literally no jobs. A plethora of useless, government funded social services that just band-aid the issues without any real solutions. No growth. Massive drug problems. Kid in year 9 was stabbed and killed on the beach next door to us last year over drugs. Another stabbing on the beach in town a year later. Every month we get SMS notifications for missing persons - all high school kids. So sad. Schools are shocking. Biggest tragedy is the notoriously high suicide rate here.

Health services are terrible. The hospital has no public outpatient clinics and no intention to establish any because it would undercut the income of the established, near-exclusively private-billing specialists. Patients are forced to pay enormous fees for essential health services or opt to travel to a capital city for public outpatient health care. There seems to be little to no interest on the part of council to change this to either retain and attract rural doctors or to invest in innovative solutions to improve accessibility to health care.

The patients I see every day bear witness to the tragedy of this place - suffering, poverty, homelessness, depression. It’s a retirement town - always has been and there is a critical shortage of doctors caring for nursing home residents and the established aging population. Now there is an insane housing market that is less affordable than Melbourne. I don’t know who is profiting from this madness but it’s clearly not going into any meaningful infrastructure for this dead-end town. I know a town needs people for growth and it can’t improve if people don’t come. But be informed.