ANNA
There's a few places in Australia where you're almost guaranteed to hear another British accent. And it appears that hospitals, with so many doctors and nurses hailing from the UK, are one of them.
MIKE
I would kind of estimate, I reckon that... On average, it's about one in three, one in four, would be from the UK or Ireland, doctors and nurses.
ANNA
Dr Mike reckons he's one of many Brits working in the healthcare sector down under.
MIKE
My name's Mike Mrozinski. I'm from Glasgow. I'm out in Australia with my partner and I'm a Britstralian.
ANNA
Dr. Mike made the move to Australia with his girlfriend in 2016,
MIKE
so I was in Melbourne for about five years and then I moved to the Gold Coast for a year.
And then most recently I was up in far North Queensland around Cairns.
ANNA
But that hasn't stopped him from working for the NHS. When he goes back to Scotland to visit his family, Dr Mike likes to help out at his local hospital.
MIKE
Yeah, so I do a kind of working holiday. I just don't like to take too much time off and try and work while I'm back. Because I enjoy it, it doesn't actually feel as if it's too much work.
ANNA
And Dr. Mike, who was back in Glasgow at the time of recording this podcast, says, it wasn't just the sunshine, which drew him abroad.
MIKE
When I went to med school, I went in with this, you know, I came from a, a working class family and we didn't have doctors in the family. You know, I got into and I thought I had this idealistic view of what being a doctor was gonna be like. You know, I'd be, I go in and I'll make a big difference.
ANNA
Oh, bless you. So what kind of doctor are you? What area do you specialize in?
MIKE
Yeah, so I do a mixture of things actually. I originally went to medical school to be an emergency department doctor, but I actually got into the training and realised that the emergency department life was probably not for me.
It was really, really intense, and the hours and the shift patterns were pretty horrendous, so I actually jumped ship. And became a GP instead. What I do now is I work as a rural GP in Australia, which means that I fly out to places where basically I look after the hospital, the emergency department, and I do all the GP clinics as well.
Yes. It gives a real variety to my day. So I still get to keep my acute skills up, but I still get to enjoy my day-to-day stuff as a GP. But when I come back to the UK I just work in my emergency departments and yeah, I, I still really enjoy it, it's just really good experience and I, I love the working and I know all the people that work there, and it's a very comfortable atmosphere for me and just good when I go back to Australia, because it's usually just me in these places. So I really need to be on the ball when it comes to dealing with sick people.
ANNA
When you work in Australia, do you work for the public health system or are you in private health?
MIKE
No, so I'm, I'm completely in the public health system. I mean, I have worked when I was in Melbourne I split my time between doing some private work and some public work.
I mean, coming from the UK with the NHS, I think, you know, most of us, if not all of us, get into medicine because we're a caring profession and we want to help people so the concept of asking people to pay for health care really doesn't sit very well with me. So even when I did do a little bit of private work in Melbourne, I did offset it by still doing a lot of public work as well.
ANNA
Why did you choose to move to Australia, say, over somewhere like Canada? Why did you choose Australia?
MIKE
It was about 2015 and I had been a GP for a year and my plan was I wanted to go and work in as many GP practices as I could in a year so that I could see if there was any places that looked like a good place for me to work long term.
So I was kind of looking for some inspiration, if you like. And I worked down in London, I worked in Liverpool, I worked in Hull. I worked at some really random places. And after that year, I thought, no, I didn't find any practices that I thought I could see myself working. And yeah, I actually became a bit burnt out as well, just by probably working too much.
But after that year, I was kind of disillusioned and I thought, well, I mean, I'm potentially going to be doing this for the next 30 or 40 years. And can I see myself doing this job? And you know, the sad answer was no. And the options for me at that time were, well, I can either keep doing this and making myself more stressed and potentially affecting my health.
But then I thought, my sister, who's younger than me, she's a doctor as well. She had gone out to Australia about three or four years previous. So I kind of had a chat with her about what it was like out there and she said that they treated doctors really well and she really enjoyed her time there. As soon as I arrived in Australia I felt as if, you know, people were really appreciative of what I was doing. And I felt as if it was making a difference, which is why we go to med school in the first place.
ANNA
In what way? How were you treated? What were you, what was...
MIKE
Yeah, so, so even just very simple things like what do you want your week to look like? What days do you want to work? How long do you want to work? What special areas have you got in your... general practice that you'd like to develop, but also just things like, in Australia, there's a big thing on trying to leave on time. As soon as you finish, you try and get home as quickly as possible. So I'd be sitting in my room, maybe 20 minutes after I was supposed to finish and one of the other doctors or the practice manager would come in and say, what are you still doing here? you know-
ANNA
Wow.
MIKE
I, I think our training in the UK is some of the best in the world and when you go to other places, I think that kind of comes to the front that you've been trained to a high level. So again, people are just happy that you're listening to them and you're treating the problems well. And yeah, as soon as I arrived, I felt as if, yeah, this was the right decision.
ANNA
And what about the lifestyle in Australia? Do you enjoy the way of living?
MIKE
Absolutely. Yeah, I think people are a lot more laid back in Australia than they are in the UK. Even just getting down to the beach with the sun, being outdoors a lot more, being a lot more active. I think one of the big things for me as well was that when I was in the UK, at the weekends I would just end up going to the pub or drinking with your friends and things.
And it was more of a, you know, it's a social thing, but it's also kind of trying to get over the stressful week that you've had as well. And I don't think that was particularly healthy for me either, but being in Australia, I don't drink as much, I try to be more active and yeah, try to use my time productively, you know, and even just silly things like, uh, I got my boating license so I can take boats out and things and getting on a little paddle board and a surfboard and yeah, it makes a big difference.
ANNA
Definitely. Was it easy for you to get a visa to go out to Australia and what visa did you come to Australia on?
Yeah, I must admit it was really easy for me to get a visa. I think I had a skilled visa at the time. I think it was a 189 or something maybe.
ANNA
Uh huh.
MIKE
I think it's changed since then, since when I came over.
Yeah, I didn't have to do any exams either because the Australian GP exams are based on the UK ones, so it's kind of like an equivalent degree, which was great, yeah, so I just basically got over and started work straight away.
ANNA
Fab. So you came out with the intention of being here for maybe a year, you said, but you've been here for seven years now.
What's kept you in Australia?
MIKE
I was moving to Australia on the premise that I might be there for a year or two and then, you know, see where I go from there. But yeah, when I arrived, they almost kind of laid out the red carpet for us. I just really enjoy my work now. The idea of, was to go there short term, take a little bit of a break from the NHS and go back, kind of reinvigorated and ready to go again.
But in actual fact, I just enjoy the work so much better in Australia and I'd look forward to going to work there, that um, the thought of coming back here and doing it full time again, it's probably not something that I'm ready to do just yet. We'll see what happens in the future, but certainly I'm enjoying what I've got just now and I think I'll keep doing it until things start to change.
I mean, obviously the big draw of being in the UK is my family and my friends. You know, I kind of miss them incredibly and as much as you move to new places, you never really meet friends like you had, you know, when you were growing up or friends that you had through school or medical school type of thing.
So I think that's really hard, and obviously my mum and dad are getting a bit older as well now, so it's certainly a lot harder to be there for those reasons, but for working reasons and professional reasons, the work in Australia for me is far, far superior.
ANNA
A lot of my expat friends in Australia are either nurses or midwives.
Is the healthcare system in Australia made up predominantly of an expat workforce?
MIKE
Yeah, it's quite funny because I, in some of the places I go in Australia to kind of remoter places, you still run into people from, you know, England or Ireland in really random parts of Australia that you think nobody would even think to go.
ANNA
When you talk about these remote places, how remote are you talking?
MIKE
Some of the hospitals I go to, I fly into Cairns and then I drive for typically three hours either up, in or down the way. So that, I mean, it's not kind of. Outback type of thing, but it's still, the shops sometimes close at midday and they don't reopen until, you know, the next day.
And they're just like in these kind of one horse town type of things.
ANNA
Wow.
MIKE
When I left the other day, I think it was 37, 38, but just very, very humid as well. So as soon as you leave the house, just start sweating and you really have to just be in shorts and a t shirt or else you wouldn't survive.
ANNA
Yeah, it's too hot.
MIKE
Absolutely. Yeah, it's been a good experience because literally the only doctor in the town, whatever comes through the door, you have to deal with it.
ANNA
Do you work with quite a lot of Aboriginal communities?
MIKE
Yes. So I think that's one thing from this year that I've really, really enjoyed actually is that I've worked in two Aboriginal communities now.
And to be honest, you know, I really didn't know what to expect because I moved to Melbourne first of all, and I didn't really have that much experience with any Aboriginal patients. And so, When you're going into an Aboriginal community, you don't really know, especially being from the UK, I don't really, yeah, exactly, don't really know much about the culture.
I did try to read up as much as I could and just try to understand the differences between potentially with any medical types of issues. But no, I really enjoyed it and the people were so friendly and so nice to me. And I worked in a really smaller community as well that only had 100 or 200 people.
Yeah, I really, really enjoyed it.
ANNA
Do you have any advice for anybody who works in healthcare in the UK who might be interested in living and working abroad?
MIKE
To be honest, I would always recommend people going to Australia. Moving to Australia has been a great move for me and certainly for lots of other people that I know that have moved over.
I think even if it's just for a kind of reset for a year or two, just to give yourself a break, which was supposed to be my idea. You get experience in another healthcare setting, so you can see how things work over there, you can see how things work in the NHS, and then maybe if you do come back you can apply some of those to help, you know, the workforce in the NHS.
ANNA
Can you ever see yourself moving back to the UK to live?
MIKE
I mean, I can, but I would have to have a real plan of what I was going to do when I was back. I wouldn't come back and be a GP in the UK, so I would have to... Have a different plan as to what it was going to do for work.
ANNA
Mike shares his experiences on social media. You can follow him, find all the links in the description wherever you're listening to this podcast and on the Britstralian website.