By Katharine Summers, October 2022, © All Rights Reserved.
I first met Dr Leong in 2009, he was tall, spry, light of hoof, with alert brown eyes and a gentle smile. His brown hair was cut short and stuck up in slight spikey (trendy?) shoots but overall, you had the impression of a young man directed by a vital inner force. In short, a light shone from him. He was my local GP and I liked him (not in any improper sense) straight away.
A potted history includes, his years of medical training in Singapore, serving in the military as a field surgeon. In 2004, Dr Leong led a medical team to Aceh, Indonesia in the aftershocks of the Boxing Day tsunami. As he said: “Aceh was going for independence [at the time], so on top of the tsunami there was rebel fighting. It was mayhem, like a war zone,’ he said. ‘We spent the first few days just finding survivors who were mostly kids whose parents had died. Our main job was doing amputations. It was very stressful, particularly doing it on kids.”[1]
Later on, Dr Leong switched to becoming a GP and moved to Australia with his wife and baby daughter. He attained a Fellowship and examined for the Royal Australian College of General Practitioners, teaching and mentoring other medical students. Spurred by his experiences in Aceh, Dr Leong ran a charity that provided medical and dental services to Cambodian villagers. Locally, he also began a charity for disadvantaged children in Western Australia. Often, he spent his entire holidays, donating his time and medical expertise to those in need, for free.
Aside from his GP duties, of which, I and my children, were lucky recipients, Dr Leong perceived that his surgical skills could make a difference in combatting the long public waitlists. (Incidentally, if you ever read the Google reviews on Dr Leong, patient after patient give him nothing less than five stars.)
Dr Leong’s surgical beneficiaries, typically, had no health insurance, nor could afford to see a private plastic, orthopaedic or hand surgeon. Some were also unable to unable to travel long distances, owing to being elderly or frail. Thus, Dr Leong took up an extra mantle, providing small, technical operations such as, haemorrhoidectomy, carpal tunnel release, ptosis correction and blepharoplasty, tendon repair, skin cancer surgery, etc. All of these patients came to the good doctor by referral – and all of his operations were bulked billed, so no patient paid the notorious ‘gap’.
It is worth noting, that the Australian Medicare rebate he received for these services was minimal. For example, a carpal tunnel operation attracts a $248 rebate – Supposedly to cover 90 minutes of the surgeon’s time, the nurse’s duties, occupational therapy, equipment maintenance and resources. In the private sector, carpal tunnel surgery will cost anywhere between $800 to $3000 dependent on the specialist. Similarly, the rate for skin cancer lesions, often involving a graft or skin flap to the nose or face, will find a patient out of pocket to the tune of anything between 1000 and 2000 dollars.
In May of this year, Dr Leong received a probing call from the Department of Health and Aged Care (DOH). He inquired, “Is this an audit?” The doctor’s previous experience of this process having been long, and very stressful. The Department’s representative replied, “no, it’s a just friendly chat…” When in fact, it was the beginning of another tedious grilling over many months, from the government, suggesting he was a fraud. The comment was made, “we can’t figure out if you’re a keloid or melanoma!”
Dr Leong had “…thought that through all these years that I’ve been doing these surgeries…I would have saved the health department a tonne of money [by] keeping patients out of hospital. This is the sunset of GP’s doing surgical work…there’s no incentives for [young doctors] to learn these procedures.”
This was the second audit on this good doctor, and because of the stress he stopped taking new patients honouring only those that were already in treatment. The domino effect of this ongoing bureaucratic harassment, effected Dr Leong strength. The harm was done, and he has become very ill. For the sake of his health and well-being, he withdrew from medical practise. The end of his career signalled a shocking loss for our community, not just for me personally, but because we had lost one of the medical profession’s true saints. ‘I’m not expecting a medal or trophy,’ Dr Leong once commented, “I just don’t want to be labelled a fraud.”
My question is, why aren’t we giving Dr Leong a medal? Or an award for a lifetime’s service to humanity? We should be building a statue in his honour, not driving a good man from his life’s vocation to an early grave.
Dr Leong is just one among the many human souls, across many walks of life, who have been keel-hauled, crushed and broken over the wheel of mindless bureaucratic hoops, interrogations, condemnatory interviews, and box-ticking paperwork.
Sadly, I took a card and a bunch of wildflowers down to our surgery for Dr Leong. A few of us gathered in the wait-room, the empty chairs still segregated after Covid looked for all the world like cemetery markers.
The news was not good. As we waited, hoping for his recovery, I couldn’t help but think of all of those bureaucratic clowns sitting in their air conditioned offices, cowering behind government protocols, peering at dim screens filled with digital spreadsheets. Because if you don’t tick a box, you are different, you are outcast and you are alien.
Visualise, all of the taxes, resources and grand buildings that have been lent over to this industry. Drones in office after office, in every city, in every state, in every country across this natural, beautiful world of ours. Hours and hours of human-time devoted to the busy delivery of more and more Ai-lead administrivia. A nightmarish, Orwellian reality, making people’s lives a stressful misery, to no good end, for no good reason. It is an insanity, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing.[2]
[1] Quotations by kind courtesy and permission of Filip Vukasin, journalist.
[2] My friend, The Bard, after the Oxfordian tradition.