Healthy Outlook:

RGS students, past and present, build healthy connections

From helping sick patients to consoling families during vulnerable times in their lives, Dr Raqeeb Rasul (RGS 2012) has found his calling in medicine.

Raqeeb was the keynote speaker at the RGS “A Career in Health and How to Get There” presentation in the School’s Duggan Hall in February.

Joining Raqeeb on the guest speaker panel were Lucy McCartney (RGS 2021, JCU medical student), Robyn Reddiex (nee Sedgwick, RGS 2011, CQU Occupational Therapist) and Jazmine Godsmark (RGS 2019, CQU Nurse).

Raqeeb is currently an advanced trainee and senior registrar in the Intensive Care Unit at Rockhampton Hospital. He is also an associate lecturer with the University of Queensland Faculty of Medicine’s Rural Clinical School in Rockhampton.

It’s been a welcomed return home for Raqeeb who grew up in Rockhampton, was RGS Dux in 2012 and then studied medicine at the University of New South Wales in Sydney.

Speaking to the students, Raqeeb said it did not feel like that long ago that he was sitting at school wondering what his life might look like in the next 10 years.

“Lucky for me I always knew I wanted to study medicine,” Raqeeb said. The journey after school also made Raqeeb realise he wasn’t ready for big city living.

“Hundreds of students in the lecture theatre, being on a train for an hour getting to hospital, getting to hospital and then just being one of the medical students from three or four different universities. I was feeling like a small fish in a big pond and I was quite disillusioned,’’ Raqeeb said.

Thankfully Raqeeb was not lost to medicine after a placement in the Coffs Harbour Hospital for his last two years of university.

“That’s where I started to fall in love with medicine as a career and a lifestyle,’’ he said.

“After med school I realised I wanted to come home and live in the community where I grew up and give back to a community that had given me so much. I came back to Rocky in 2019 and started an internship.”

While working in Rockhampton, Raqeeb has discovered his passion for intensive care medicine.

“I had a rotation in intensive care in my second year. In a few weeks I realised that’s what I wanted to do,’’ Raqeeb said.

“It captured all the reasons that first drew me to health care. We deal with the sickest patients - these can be adults, children, elderly, pregnant women. We look after medical problems like those dealing with heart, lungs, kidney, brain or all of them at the same time. They can be surgical or trauma. They can just about be anything in medicine.

“Most of what we do is using our brains – using knowledge and creativity to solve complex medical problems to help all the pieces of the puzzle fit together. We also have hands on procedures.

“We talk to people and their families. A lot of the time they are difficult conversations and during a vulnerable period in peoples lives. But this is the time when we get to make the biggest difference. Not only to save or prolong a life but a lot of the time to try and make sure someone can be comfortable and dignified as they approach their death.”

Raqeeb said the opportunities and experiences in a small hospital in a regional town have been incredible and things he never could have dreamt of. Eventually, Raqeeb will have to return to a bigger city hospital where they have “unlimited resources and new technology” so he can learn all the different ways to work in medicine.

His ultimate goal is to bring these skills and knowledge back to regional Australians and help change the health practices in regional areas over the next five, 10 and 15 years.

“The future of health care in this country has to be in regional areas,’’ Raqeeb said.

“We need more doctors and nurses, and all the allied health staff. We need to share resources, infrastructure and knowledge from big cities and tertiary centres to regional areas like this so all Australians have an equal opportunity to health care.

“Initiatives like the regional pathway and JCU medical school are such an important part in making that dream a reality.

“More than that these initiatives, are incredible opportunities for students like ourselves to find our own way into medicine and try and build a career and pathway for us so we can contribute to the health and wellbeing of our community well into the future.”