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Faces of AMA: Dr Deepa Daniel
Dr Deepa Daniel is a Melbourne GP, educator and television presenter.
“Why are you a member of AMA?Dr Daniel is far from being a typical general practitioner. As Channel Ten’s resident GP for its morning program The Circle, Deepa juggles her TV appearances with patient consultations, medical editing, academic research and teaching, wrote AMA Victoria Media and Public Affairs Officer Fronscesca Jackson-Webb, in a profile that appeared in the August 2010 edition of the vicdoc magazine.
As a general practitioner, being an AMA member is important to me. The AMA offers a voice to general practitioners in the political arena, ensuring that the important views of GPs are heard and the integral role of general practice is not forgotten when it comes to health reform. My membership provides a sense of collegiality in what is otherwise sometimes an isolated area of medicine. At a practice level, knowing the AMA can support me with the various challenges facing a small independent practice is reassuring. Just like any other profession, doctors need political and social representation, and I believe the AMA helps to fill in this gap."
Most GPs begin the morning with a tea or coffee before they begin seeing patients and giving health advice. For Dr Deepa Daniel, her fortnightly Wednesday morning routine is a little different. She spends an hour getting her hair and make-up done, then, instead of a ten to fifteen minute consultation with a patient, she speaks to thousands of viewers on Channel Ten’s new morning show, The Circle.
Squeezing everything in to a four-minute segment is difficult, Deepa says, so keeps it fairly simple. “I try to focus on a couple of things rather than have too many messages for the audience. For some of these quite complex medical issues it’s better to get a small amount out rather than try to take on too much.”
Deepa’s producer sets the topic the Friday before the segment and Deepa spends time over the following three days researching and developing her messages. “I generally get a very, very broad topic or an article of some kind that has been in the news,” Deepa explains. “That weekend I spend a bit of time reading around the subject and try to work out what may focus will be and some of the key messages that I need to convey to the wider community.”
Deepa was flagged as a potential candidate for Channel Ten’s GP position earlier this year by AMA’s public affairs department, following her active role in AMA Victoria’s Section of General Practice. She auditioned at Channel Ten’s South Yarra studios and within weeks was sitting alongside presenters Chrissie Swan, Denise Drysdale, Yumi Stynes and Gorgi Coghlan, dishing out simple but important health advice to Channel Ten’s morning viewers.
Deepa’s segments on The Circle to date have covered influenza vaccinations, contraception, women’s and men’s preventative health, and sleep deprivation in early parenting. The most memorable was the segment on female contraception, when she brought along a range of different contraceptive devices as props – though it didn’t go strictly according to plan.
“It was going really well until we got out the female condom and diaphragm - they were particularly visual. These days we don’t often see those particular devices very often and so the segment kind of deteriorated into a heap of laughter from the presenters and the audience. By the end of the segment, I walked out and I wasn’t really sure whether there was much medical information conveyed.”
But humour was exactly the tool Deepa needed to get viewers past the initial embarrassment and on to thinking about their sexual health. “Part of the role is to make health accessible to viewers and I think it did that and, ultimately, it’s a segment that people remember,” she says. “We were able to tell people about the risks of STDs, and the importance of speaking to GPs about their individual situations. If you take theses things too seriously, people don’t want to hear about them.”
Deepa’s weekly schedule looks more like a specialist’s than a GP’s. She spends the rest of her Wednesdays at the University of Melbourne, one day a week she edits the Australian Family Physician journal at the Royal Australian College of General Practitioners office, and three days a week and every second Saturday she sees patients at her family general practice clinic.
Her mum set the East Heidelberg clinic up in 1980 and still works alongside Deepa and two other part-time GPs. The clinic’s receptionist has been with them for the thirty years and used to change one-year-old Deepa’s nappies back when the practice first opened. Deepa is drawn to the variety of clinical work at the practice. “It’s full of patients with very different cultural backgrounds, a few refugees, and there’s a real emphasis on family medicine and preventative care,” she says.
Deepa graduated from medical school in 2003 and spent three years working in hospitals on various medical, emergency and surgical capacities. Unsure of whether she wanted to pursue general practice or physician training, she took some time off and travelled to East Timor for a working holiday. It was there she realised her passion for general practice and her preference for “being able to treat a whole lot of things rather than just focusing on one.”
Deepa completed her GP registrar training and sat her exams last year but rather than focus entirely on clinical general practice, she has elected to undertake an academic registrar year at Melbourne University’s Department of General Practice. Her solo research project on Vitamin D and generalised muscle pain is necessarily small and targeted. “It’s just me involved so I’ve had to keep it fairly focused,” she says.
In her second semester Deepa will begin teaching final year medical students in regular tutorials and occasional lectures. “I’m really interested in the teachings side of general practice – there’s a real art to it,” she says. “As a medical student, the General Practice training at times was quite dry. I don’t think it gave a good impression of what it is really like to be a GP.” Teaching is therefore an opportunity to promote general practice as an exciting and diverse career option for medical students.
While Deepa loves the variety of her current schedule, she concedes that eventually she will have to cut back her workload. “I don’t know whether I can sustain having so much variety in a week for longer than a year. Eventually I will have to decide on which parts of my life to focus on.” Clinical general practice will definitely be a focus of her career, Deepa says, but she would also like to pursue medical editing or teaching or research.
In the meantime, Deepa is content juggling her different general practice roles. “This whole Circle experience has been an amazing opportunity to educate the community a little bit about the role of general practice and give it the publicity that it deserves,” she says.
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