Sub-specialty careers

[Dr Kate Crossley - Neurologist, Dubbo Hospital]

Hi, I'm Dr Kate Crossley, Neurologist at Dubbo Hospital.

I'm proud to call myself a pioneer in public neurology services in Western New South Wales, but now the demand for the service is outgrowing me and I need your help. A move to Dubbo could be all the difference you need to make.

It's really exciting actually because there's there's so many things that have improved and changed as a result of having permanent staff here myself really in neurology. 

I think some of the biggest achievements that I'm proudest of include the stroke pathways, so I've been able to develop and implement a new stroke pathway that's evidence-based medicine that is improving the care of patients throughout Western New South Wales and that's been a huge reward and then obviously the other major thing i'm really proud about is the development of the neuro physiology service, so this is the first public neuro physiology service west of the Blue Mountains and it provides EEG and nerve conduction studies to all patients, inpatients, outpatients and that's just such a vital piece of investigative medicine to have here.

Something that I really find rewarding is that there's the University of Sydney Medical School here as well and so I have regular teaching sessions with medical students. I also do some lectures to the students and to the junior medical officers which is really good fun and you get a much closer bond with the junior colleagues here than you do in city hospitals.

One of the things that was a bit scary to me moving to the country was the thought that I would lose that collegiality and neurology is a specialty where you really rely heavily on having peers available to discuss cases, but what I've been able to do here is to have meetings with the neurologists down in Orange and also like peers at Royal Prince Alfred Hospital in Sydney and that's enabled me to share those cases with with my peers.

I've also been able to attend lots of international and Australian conferences to keep my education levels up and the hospital is very supportive of all those activities to keep us abreast of current medicine which has been very reassuring for me in terms of my current knowledge and professional development.

There's lots of things that I'd really like to do here in Dubbo to build the neurology services, I'd love to have a neuro-vestibular laboratory here, I'd love to start neuro maternity clinics to focus on people who are pregnant and have neurological issues. Obviously, there's work still to be done with building the stroke unit here, there's such a lot of new research happening in stroke medicine and it would be good to make Dubbo part of that research community as well but I can't do all those things here by myself unfortunately and I really need other neurologists to come and join me to help build this service.

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Dubbo Hospital Careers
A move to Dubbo could make all the difference!
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