ON A cool May evening in 1978, my mother lay exhausted in the Inglewood Hospital.
She had been labouring since early that morning but the delivery did not appear to be progressing and as night began to approach the local GP, Dr Col Owen, was summoned by the matron.
Mum clearly recalls that Dr Owen, who had been working on his farm that day, arrived at her bedside dressed in his overalls.
He had delivered my two older siblings without complication but my sister was proving more difficult.
“He told me that the baby was sideways and that he was going to have to do a caesarean and I remember saying very firmly that I didn’t want to go to Toowoomba,” my mother said.
“He assured me that he could do it in Inglewood and he called the doctor over from Texas, Dr Graham Exelby, to be the anaesthetist.
“A local lady was called in to give blood because I needed a transfusion and by 7 o’clock that night the baby had arrived safely.”
“That’s just what they did back then – they delivered babies in country hospitals.”
By the time Dr Owen delivered my mother’s last baby (me) a year later, he had become something akin to a living legend in our household.
Given my siblings and I were among hundreds of babies (including Queensland Health Minister Lawrence Springborg) brought into the world by Dr Owen, it’s certain that many other families from the Inglewood district have similar tales.
“I did obstetrics for 35 years until Queensland Health decided that we couldn’t do obstetrics and surgery in small country hospitals anymore,” he said.
“I lost count of the number of babies I delivered but it would be well into the hundreds.”
This year, Dr Owen is celebrating 50 years as a rural GP, having practiced for 47 years in Inglewood and three years in Charleville.
He was the founding president of the Rural Doctors Association of Queensland (RDAQ) in 1989, the founding president of the Rural Doctors Association of Australia (RDAA) in 1990 and a foundation fellow of the Australian College of Rural and Remote Medicine.
His achievements have been many yet when he reflects on his 50 years of service, Dr Owen says his early work with the RDAQ remains a highlight.
“A lot of the things that have happened in rural health since have been based on the policies we created in those very early days and that was only possible because of the political access we had at the time,” he said.
Dr Owen initially headed up a group called the Western Queensland Superintendents which represented the interests of all hospital superintendents west of the Great Dividing Range.
It was from this organisation that 60 doctors banded together to call for better wage and working entitlements.
“This was before fax machines, email or even teleconferences and I remember I wrote that first letter to the sixty doctors by hand and used carbon copy paper,” Dr Owen said.
Dr Owen said the impetus to form the RDAQ was initially two-fold.
“The first reason was industrial,” he said.
“At that time there were no leave entitlements for doctors, Queensland Health didn’t supply locums.
“You got what you could when you could and a lot of the time you couldn’t get anyone to relieve you because it’s a fairly difficult job compared to working in a practice in the city.
“The second reason was I that really felt that rural doctors were undervalued compared with the rest of the profession and I felt that was dreadfully wrong because some of the most outstanding doctors in those days were rural doctors.
After unsuccessfully trying to negotiate with Queensland Health for several years, Dr Owen and his fellow rural doctors were forced to take the Department to the Industrial Relations Commission.
“We got a really good result there,” he said.
“The wage part increased by a factor of about 2.5pc in one hit and for the first time we were guaranteed recreation leave and study leave with locums provided by Queensland Health.
“It was a very bid advance and one that I think did more for recruitment and retention of rural doctors in Queensland than anything else.”
It was this group of 60 doctors that Dr Owen used as the nucleus to form the RDAQ in 1989.
By this time, the National Party was in power and with the help of the then Health Minister, Ivan Gibbs, Dr Owen was able to push for the establishment of a separate unit for rural health.
“We had direct access to the Minister and we could talk, not only about terms and conditions of service, but also about educational requirements and the sort of things we wanted to do to make rural medicine a much more attractive area to ensure Queensland communities had better health services,” he said.
“For the first time we had a political role.
“We were able to develop policies in relation to rural health that we had never had before.
Dr Owen said he was particularly pleased to see the RDAQ advocate for members during the recent negotiations with Queensland Health regarding doctors’ contracts.
“Most of the work for rural doctors in this area was picked up by the RDAQ and as an old industrial advocate myself, I thought it was done very well,” he said.
Despite his 50 years of service, Dr Owen continues to put in big hours in his work as a rural GP.
He now has two doctors working with him at the Inglewood Medical Centre but said sixty hour weeks are still common.
“That’s pretty good compared to the massive hours I used to do when I was on my own and on call all the time by myself,” he said.
“I’m still enjoying the work very much.”
Dr Owen will reflect on 25 years of achievement for the RDAQ at their annual conference in Brisbane in June 5-8.
A full report from the conference will be published in next week’s Queensland Country Life.