Congratulations to Dr Mike de Vries

I want to pay tribute to retiring GP Dr Mike de Vries, who has served the Winmalee community, including my family, for pretty much as long as I've lived in Winmalee. I know Mike is looking forward to retirement, but he will be much missed at the Winmalee Medical Centre, which grew out of his original practice, where his wife, Jennifer, was practice manager for many years.

I don't know how many patients Mike will have seen in his four decades of caring for the mountains' locals, but last evening when I was speaking to a Canberra local who mentioned he had spent many years in the Blue Mountains, we somehow got onto the topic of GPs and, of course, Mike de Vries was his GP, and held in very high regard. Mike's a past chair of the Blue Mountains division of general practice. He has also had a long commitment to training up new GPs, which was really key in ensuring that we have had sufficient doctors available. Some loved it so much that they stayed. I note that for his efforts, among the many wonderful mountains' GPs who do supervise students, Mike was named supervisor of the year for the Nepean, Western Sydney and Northern Sydney training region back in 2021. I know he plans to continue doing GP training in his retirement.

We do need to see more doctors signing up to be GPs and there are some green shoots of promise. In 2024 close to one-in-five medical graduates said they aspired to a career as a GP or rural GP, with 17.5 per cent nominating general practice or rural generalism as their prefer speciality in the annual medical deans' survey. The numbers of junior doctors actually choosing to go into general practice grows each year. In 2024 more than 1,600 doctors accepted a place on a government-funded training program to become a GP or a rural GP—that's a 13 per cent increase on the year before. For 2025 more than 1,750 offers are expected to be made to junior doctors to begin government-funded GP training, leading to an intake that could be up to 10 per cent larger than 2024. It's a start, and the Royal Australian College of General Practitioners expects to fill every one of the placements that it has available for the first time in years.

Australian GP training is delivered jointly by the two GP colleges that exist—the Royal Australian College of General Practitioners and the Australian College of Rural and Remote Medicine—and is fully funded by the Australian government. We will continue to look to GPs like Dr Mike de Vries to be training up the next cohort of GPs so needed throughout so many of our communities.