Long-term and well-known W\u0101naka GP Lucy O\u2019Hagan will return home as a guest speaker at next month\u2019s Aspiring Conversations and then she will stay for good.<\/p>\n
Originating from Southland, Dr O\u2019Hagan spent 20 years as a GP in W\u0101naka and owned Aspiring Medical Centre.<\/p>\n
She completed her book\u00a0Everything but the Medicine\u00a0late last year and after five years living in coastal Wellington, she is returning to Hawea Flat.<\/p>\n
\u2018\u2018It\u2019s home. We have had a really great adventure, it is quite good when your kids leave home you can sort of be mobile.\u2019\u2019<\/p>\n
The experienced doctor and author will not return to general practice but look to move her work online.<\/p>\n
\u2018\u2018I am a little bit out of touch with where W\u0101naka is at the moment.<\/p>\n
\u2018\u2018I know it has grown hugely; talks of a hospital.<\/p>\n
\u2018\u2018It is quite interesting because apart from the islands it is the furthest from a base hospital of any town in the country.<\/p>\n
\u2018\u2018It makes it quite complicated because it is quite a big urban area.\u2019\u2019<\/p>\n
Over the past five years she had been working near Porirua, Wellington and said her clients were completely different from here in W\u0101naka.<\/p>\n
\u2018\u2018It has been very different to W\u0101naka, 85%-90% of the people I see are Pasifika-Maori.<\/p>\n
\u2018\u2018It is completely different.<\/p>\n
\u2018\u2018They often have a high level of physical health need, lots of diabetes and people on dialysis and heart failure.\u2019\u2019<\/p>\n
She added there was a real sense of community with those families.<\/p>\n
\u2018\u2018They have a very good collective health. The old people are cared for at home; the disabled kids are all at home.<\/p>\n
\u2018\u2018It is quite an amazing experience, very family orientated.\u2019\u2019<\/p>\n
Having worked with marginalised communities, such as patients who were homeless or had a drug addiction, Dr O\u2019Hagan had learned how important it was to appreciate a person\u2019s story and not just their ailment.<\/p>\n
Being a general practitioner for over 30 years, she has worked in a huge range of contexts: rural tourist town, shearing gang clinics, urban iwi-run services and free clinics for the homeless.<\/p>\n
She is also a well-known GP writer, speaker and performer who has written plays, given addresses and performances at conferences and written a monthly column for\u00a0New Zealand Doctor\u00a0since 2017.<\/p>\n
\u2018\u2018Doctors are sitting with very big stories, some of it is transactional \u2014 they just want the blood-pressure pills and a checkup and they are out the door \u2014 but that\u2019s unusual.\u2019\u2019<\/p>\n
She will be part of the \u2018\u2018Healthcare in Crisis\u2019\u2019 k\u014drero in the festival on Sunday, March 29, alongside fellow health experts Rob Campbell and Boyd Swinburn, discussing the critical condition of our healthcare system.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Long-term and well-known W\u0101naka GP Lucy O\u2019Hagan will return home as a guest speaker at next month\u2019s Aspiring…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":284471,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3],"tags":[42,43,40,38,41,39],"class_list":{"0":"post-284470","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-headlines","8":"tag-headlines","9":"tag-news","10":"tag-top-news","11":"tag-top-stories","12":"tag-topnews","13":"tag-topstories"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/284470","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=284470"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/284470\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/284471"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=284470"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=284470"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=284470"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}