Careers

Dr Bodhi Wimalasena

Dr Bodhi Wimalasena

Bodhi recently returned from Australia as a House Officer and explains why she prefers training in Auckland...

I am currently a 3rd year house officer working at Auckland City Hospital. I spent my first year as a house officer at North Shore Hospital (Waitemata DHB). I   learnt a lot from my experience there as I was exposed to a wide variety of patient cases, had the opportunity to do many practical procedures and had excellent teaching sessions. Even though at times it was extremely busy, I found I was able to cope with this, through the tremendous support from the consultants. It was a very friendly environment to work in with great inter-disciplinary relations.

I spent most of my 2nd year at Auckland City Hospital. Again, I really enjoyed all my rotations and found the senior support to be excellent. I valued the opportunity to do subspecialty rotations such as oncology and cardiology at Auckland.

At the end of 2009 (my 2nd year), my sister (also a house officer) and I decided to go to Brisbane, Australia to gain some overseas experience and see how the work environment is there. However, after working for about 1 month at one of the main hospitals in Brisbane, we found that we were not enjoying ourselves at all and greatly missing certain aspects of  our working life back in Auckland.  Many of us wonder if Australia is a better place to work, but what  my sister and I found was that the grass is not necessarily greener on the other side. We feel that New Zealand hospitals offer many things that Australia does not necessarily offer. Most importantly we felt that the consultants in New Zealand  are a lot more accessible, supportive and empathetic towards their juniors.  Working with a collective agreement in New Zealand  provides junior doctors with  more protection and support to ensure we have better working conditions. In Brisbane our roster certainly  looked very appealing  on paper as it was  a 40 hour week. However, in actual fact you do work much longer hours and if you want to be acknowledged for it you have to go through the hassle of filling in time sheets and claiming overtime. The Auckland region is quite advanced when it comes to technology/computer systems as well. Having electronic patient files, which allows such easy access to patient information is such a luxury in Auckland, compared to perusing through thick paper files as we did in Brisbane. Orientation for doctors in Auckland is also  a lot more thorough and useful compared to Brisbane where we received  half a day of speeches of no practical benefit at all.

Our experience in Brisbane, Australia made us realize that  Auckland is such a great place to work in  and sometimes we take things for granted. My sister and I felt it was not worth continuing to work in Brisbane as we were very unhappy. So we resigned from there and now both are back at Auckland City Hospital and enjoying every moment of it!