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  • Becoming a GP
    • Medical Students
      • Find Your Local Club
    • Prevocational Doctors
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      • Prepare for GP training: mandatory hospital rotations
      • Tips for a great hospital rotation experience
      • Support services
    • Why General Practice?
    • How to become a GP or Rural Generalist
    • Starting out in general practice
    • futureGP
    • Earnings Calculator
  • GP Trainees
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      • Study Tips
      • Top tips for passing your fellowship exams
      • College Exam Information
      • What if you fail an exam?
      • Exam resources
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Category Archives: News

Meet your new GPRA Registrar Advisor – Dr Shaun Gerschwitz

GPRA, NewsBy GPRA Web4 December 2025

For Dr Suranga Wijesekara, the journey to becoming a GP in Australia began in her homeland of Sri Lanka.

Dr Ashlea McCallum: From the Snowy Mountains to rural general practice

GPRA, NewsBy GPRA Web4 December 2025

For Dr Suranga Wijesekara, the journey to becoming a GP in Australia began in her homeland of Sri Lanka.

GPRA Office Relocation – Monday 1 December 2025

NewsBy Gavin Broomhead28 November 2025

GPRA has moved office, as of Monday 1 December 2025. Our new address is: GPRA, GPT Space and Co, Melbourne Central Tower, Level 12, 360 Elizabeth Street, Melbourne VIC 3000.

eMedici and GPSN partner to support next generation of GPs and Rural Generalists

NewsBy Gavin Broomhead19 November 2025

GPRA is proud to announce that General Practice Students Network (GPSN) and eMedici have partnered on a new collaboration that strengthens medical student engagement and supports education in general practice through expanded access to high-quality, interactive learning resources.

GPRA welcomes MediRecords’ support for the next generation of GPs and RGs

NewsBy Gavin Broomhead5 November 2025

General Practice Registrars Australia (GPRA) has announced a new partnership with MediRecords, offering GPRA members exclusive discounts and access to Australia’s leading cloud-based clinical and practice management software.

Statement from GPRA leadership on the passing of GPRA’s first Patron; Professor John Murtagh AO

GPRA, NewsBy GPRA Web21 October 2025

Statement from GPRA leadership on the passing of GPRA’s first Patron; Professor John Murtagh AO GPRA was saddened to receive the news on Monday 20th October 2025, that the foundational and first Patron for GPRA, including the General Practice Students Network (GPSN), had passed.   While many knew Professor John Murtagh AO, as the man who…

Shaping the future of primary care with Dr Darran Foo

Futures, GPRA, NewsBy GPRA Web30 September 2025

When Dr Darran Foo reflects on his career so far, the common thread is clear: impact.

How Astra Health is transforming General Practice with AI

Futures, GPRA, NewsBy GPRA Web10 September 2025

At the forefront of changing technology is Astra Health, a multilingual AI-powered medical scribe founded by Gunjan Wadhwa and supported by the clinical expertise of Dr Ashish Wadhawan.

Exploring the path of Integrative Medicine with Dr Tamara Nation and Dr Poonam Chuni

GPRA, NewsBy GPRA Web23 July 2025

To help shed light on the evolving field of integrative medicine, GPRA spoke with two renowned experts, Dr Tamara Nation and Dr Poonam Chuni, who shared insights into their careers, the benefits of integrative medicine, and how GPs can incorporate holistic health approaches into their practice.

Dr Suranga Wijesekara: A rural GP’s journey from Sri Lanka to Parkes, New South Wales

GPRA, NewsBy GPRA Web27 May 2025

For Dr Suranga Wijesekara, the journey to becoming a GP in Australia began in her homeland of Sri Lanka.

Meet the sibling GPs behind the hit podcast helping trainees ‘slay’ the exam

GPRA, NewsBy GPRA Web23 April 2025

South Australian GP siblings Dr David Lam and Dr Esther Lam are on a mission to help doctors in training level up their clinical skills, ace their exams, and thrive in general practice.

From refugee to respected GP and business leader: Dr Van Nguyen’s journey of resilience and impact

GPRA, NewsBy GPRA Web16 April 2025

Dr Van Nguyen, or Dr Van as he is affectionately known, came to Australia from Vietnam in 1981 and couldn’t speak a word of English. Forward 44 years, and Dr Van is now CEO and working clinician at Dyvest Health Care, a group of 16 medical centres servicing communities across Sydney, with more than one million patient consults a year made by nearly 200 GPs.

Dr Meenal Dhabhai: Advocating for International Medical Graduates in General Practice

GPRA, NewsBy GPRA Web27 March 2025

As a newly-appointed Registrar Advisor for International Medical Graduates (IMGs) at General Practice Registrars Australia (GPRA), Dr Meenal Dhabhai hopes to use her experiences to guide and support others navigating the path to general practice.

GP Registrars and Prevocational Doctors Survey

GPRA, NewsBy GPRA Web20 March 2025

GPRA is keen to hear your view to help us with the next steps for the implementation of these new workforce initiatives.

Vagenius Training: Breaking barriers in women’s pelvic health education

GPRA, NewsBy GPRA Web10 March 2025

Vagenius Training is making waves by addressing one of the most misunderstood areas of healthcare – pelvic pain.

Xaante Thomas: A future rural GP in the making

GPRA, NewsBy GPRA Web7 March 2025

A fourth-year medical student at James Cook University (JCU) in Townsville, Xaante Thomas is well on her way to becoming a rural general practitioner with a strong passion for improving healthcare in remote communities.

President’s Message – February 2025

NewsBy GPRA Web27 February 2025

February has been an incredibly busy and rewarding month for GPRA, with significant successes that will shape the future of general practice training in Australia.

Dr Paul MacCartney: Strengthening the role of GPs in addiction medicine

NewsBy GPRA Web26 February 2025

As the newly-appointed Chief Addiction Medicine Advisor (CAMA) at Safer Care Victoria, Dr Paul MacCartney is working to reshape how general practitioners (GPs) engage with addiction medicine.

Dr Kristina Sailah: A new mum, a new role, and a passion for change

GPRA, NewsBy GPRA Web26 February 2025

For Dr Kristina Sailah, 2024 was a year of milestones. She sat — and passed — her GP fellowship exams, welcomed her first child, and has now stepped into a new role as a Registrar Advisor (RA) with GPRA.

GPRA and Heidi Health partner to enhance AI-driven support for GPs across Australia

NewsBy GPRA Web12 February 2025

General Practice Registrars Australia (GPRA) and Heidi Health are proud to announce a strategic partnership that harnesses cutting-edge AI technology to support the next generation of general practitioners (GPs).

President’s Message – January 2025

NewsBy GPRA Web24 January 2025

Happy New Year! I am delighted to introduce myself as your new GPRA President. Starting in this role has provided me with the opportunity to reflect on the key priorities we can address together.

All GPRA wants for Christmas is …

NewsBy GPRA Web19 December 2024

All GPRA wants for Christmas is … a national GP Registrar employment fund and support for more peer-to-peer activities for future GPs!

Meet Dr Chris Dickie – your new GPRA President

NewsBy GPRA Web5 December 2024

With a career defined by advocacy and an unwavering commitment to junior doctors, Dr Chris Dickie will lead GPRA as its new President into a promising new chapter, championing the rights and needs of GP registrars across Australia.

President’s Message – December 2024

NewsBy GPRA Web5 December 2024

As my tenure as GPRA President comes to a close, I find myself reflecting on the incredible journey of the past two years. It has been a privilege to serve our members — the future of general practice in Australia.

GPRA/GPSA Joint Update – Review of the NTCER for 2025/2026

NewsBy GPRA Web14 August 2024

Throughout 2024, GPRA and GPSA have been actively engaged in the process of reviewing the minimum terms and conditions underpinning the relationship between training practices and registrars.

Welcome to becoming (or about to become) a newly-Fellowed General Practitioner!

AlumniBy GPRA Web2 July 2024

Our New-Fellow Checklist will assist you through this process. It will help you to think about the things you need to get organised or update as you embark on independent practice.

Dr Eliza Cole: A champion for Therapeutic Guidelines and general practice

Alumni, NewsBy GPRA Web1 July 2024

While the hustle and bustle of hospitals often steal the spotlight, the life and career of a General Practitioner (GP) like Dr Eliza Cole highlights the unparalleled flexibility of general practice.

IGPTN supports National Reconciliation Week and recognises the importance of this years’ theme: Now More Than Ever

NewsBy GPRA Web23 May 2024

IGPTN is a network for Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander GPs in Training to receive professional and cultural support and education relevant to their training programs.

“It’s really important GP registrars are well versed in pain and opioid management” – Dr Eric Aizentros

NewsBy GPRA Web23 May 2024

Dr Eric Aizenstros, a dedicated GP at Ballarto Medical Centre in Carrum Downs, just south of Melbourne, is encouraging other GP registrars/new Fellows to join him as attendees at the next series of ECHO for Pain and Opioid Management (EPOM) sessions in June. Led by a team of Pain Specialists from Royal Melbourne Hospital and…

Discounts and GPRA grants available for AIDA cultural education courses

NewsBy GPRA Web23 May 2024

To celebrate National Reconciliation Week, the Australian Indigenous Doctors’ Association (AIDA) have teamed up with GPRA to offer registrars discounted registration and grants to its cultural education courses.

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General Practice Registrars Australia

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GPRA’s Head Office will be closed from Tuesday 24 December 2023, reopening Monday 6 January 2024.
We wish you all a wonderful Festive Season and a Happy New Year! Enjoy a well-earned break.

Re-imagining GP exam preparation through smarter learning

Dr Qi Zheng Ong (AceGP) shares how clinician-led, data-driven education is transforming how GP registrars prepare for Fellowship exams and build confidence for lifelong practice.



Can you please give a brief overview of your career to date?
We are both Australian GPs who have trained through the RACGP pathway and have built our clinical foundations in diverse settings, from metropolitan practices to rural and remote placements. Alongside our clinical work, we’ve always had a strong interest in medical education, digital health, and systems-level improvement.Over our careers, we found ourselves not only practising medicine but also mentoring junior doctors and medical students, refining exam preparation strategies, and experimenting with ways of making learning more efficient and evidence-based. That journey eventually led us to co-found AceGP, a tech-enabled education platform designed to modernise how GP registrars prepare for the RACGP Fellowship exams. Our work now sits at the intersection of frontline general practice

You are a leading GP in the health education space – what attracted you to diversify your career?
For both of us, education has been a constant thread throughout our careers, long before general practice. Between us, we’ve spent years tutoring, mentoring and building study resources; from high school and undergraduate teaching, to medical school peer-teaching and supporting GP registrars during Fellowship training. That early experience in teaching naturally evolved into developing structured programs and eventually co-founding AceGP, where we could scale high-quality educational support to registrars nationwide.

By the time we were GP registrars, education was already woven into our practice, but we noticed that exam preparation in general practice was still highly variable, inefficient, and largely under supported. Looking beyond our initial stages of offering tutoring to a small circle of students each year, we saw an opportunity to build something structured, scalable, and genuinely designed around how real registrars learn.

So our move into GP education wasn’t a “pivot” away from clinical work, it was a continuation of a pattern that started in high school and evolved with each stage of training. AceGP is simply the formalisation of a passion we’ve always had; helping others learn, but doing it in a way that actually works at scale.

What is the product/work you are leading?
We are the co-founders of AceGP, a next-generation learning platform built specifically for GP registrars preparing for the RACGP written exams (AKT & KFP). Our focus is not just content – it’s cognitive science, spaced learning, analytics, and exam performance coaching, all embedded in a single, smart platform.

AceGP is already used by multiple GP clinic groups and numerous individual GP registrars across Australia. Our goal is not just to help GP registrars pass exams, but to raise the standard of Australian general practice beyond route learning content for exams.

What do you see as some of the enablers and barriers to educational innovation in primary care in Australia?
There is a clear shift happening in GP education, as more registrars recognise that traditional rote learning and passive revision don’t match the way clinicians actually think or the way modern exams are structured. One of the biggest enablers is the move toward personalised, data-driven study; something which is already well-established in other high-stakes exams like the UCAT and GAMSAT, where candidates use analytics, adaptive learning, and structured revision rather than studying blindly. In contrast, those kinds of tools have been largely absent in GP specialty training, which is why platforms like AceGP are emerging to fill that gap. There is now growing acceptance that education in general practice needs to be structured, interactive, and tailored instead of one-size-fits-all.

The barriers are mostly practical, not philosophical. Registrars are studying while working full-time and often juggling family or on-call commitments, which makes consistency difficult. Supervisors do have protected teaching time, but they rarely get a full picture of a registrar’s knowledge gaps because most learning happens in the consulting room, out of direct observation. Many supervisors also trained years before the current AKT and KFP formats existed, so although they’re excellent clinicians, they may not be up-to-date on exam strategy, marking style, or common pitfalls. So even highly motivated trainees can feel under-supported, not through lack of effort from either side, but because the system hasn’t kept up to speed with how modern learning and assessment work. The opportunity now is to build education that fits into real GP life and gives supervisors, registrars, and training organisations access to the same data-driven picture of progress.

What do you think the future of general practice looks like?
General practice will continue to be the backbone of the Australian healthcare system, but the expectations on GPs are changing faster than ever. Medicine is evolving at a pace no individual can fully keep up with; new guidelines, new treatments, new screening pathways, and constant updates across every specialty. Unlike other specialists, GPs don’t get to focus on a narrow field; they are expected to know a bit of everything, all the time, from childhood rashes to complex multimorbidity to emerging pharmacotherapy. As careers progress, most GPs naturally develop areas of interest and attract certain types of patients, which means other clinical areas become less familiar and easier to lose touch with. The future of general practice will therefore rely on lifelong learning that is smarter than the current “complete 50 CPD hours and hope it sticks” model. We need data-driven systems that identify knowledge gaps, refresh areas we no longer see regularly, and support active recall rather than passive reading, so that GPs can stay confident, safe, and current across decades of practice, not just during training.

Why is it important GPs are involved in health innovation/new technology design?
Our work isn’t in clinical health-tech, but the same principle applies in education: tools designed for general practice only work when they’re shaped by people who actually understand the realities of the job. We saw that registrars needed smarter, data-driven learning support that matched how they study while working full-time, rather than relying on passive or outdated resources. That’s why GP-led input matters – whether it’s for AI scribes in clinics or digital learning platforms, the best solutions come from people who have lived the workload, time pressures and decision-making of real primary care, not from the outside looking in.

What would you say to early career doctors about general practice and primary healthcare?
General practice is the most diverse and rewarding clinical specialty you can choose. You’ll never see the same day twice, and you’ll use every part of your medical training. It’s a field where relationships matter as much as diagnoses, and where you get to care for patients over years, not just during a single admission. It also offers huge scope to shape your own career – whether you want to teach, do procedural work, build a niche interest, or balance medicine with family or other passions. If you want a specialty with flexibility, variety, autonomy and real human connection, primary care is an incredibly rewarding place to be.



Clinician-led AI for smarter consultations

Gunjan Wadhwa and Dr Ashish Wadhawan (Astra Health) share how clinician-designed AI can reduce documentation burden and support more efficient, patient-centred care in general practice.

Can you please give a brief overview of your career to date?
Dr Ashish brings over a decade of medical experience, having worked across multiple specialties and regions in New South Wales and Queensland. His diverse career has included roles in orthopaedics, emergency medicine, paediatrics, and radiology. After years of travelling and working around the country, he has now established himself as a GP in Sydney. Passionate about delivering progressive, holistic, and individualised care, Dr Ashish is committed to improving community health. He is particularly fascinated by innovation as a way to optimise healthcare delivery for the greater good.

With a strong interest in technology, he has explored the potential of artificial intelligence (AI) to help doctors work more efficiently and streamline patient care. As an Orthopaedic Registrar at the Royal Brisbane and Women’s Hospital (RBWH), he led a multidisciplinary team in collaboration with researchers from RBWH, CSIRO, and QUT to develop an AI deep-learning tool that predicts the complexity of fractures. His work earned a significant grant from the RBWH Foundation and was presented at multiple conferences across Australia.

Today, his passion for health innovation continues through his collaboration with Astra Health, where he is focused on integrating AI into medical practice to create meaningful, lasting improvements in patient care.Outside of Medicine, he enjoys outdoor activities with his family and three kids, keeping fit and dabbles in photography.

What is the product/work you are leading?
We are developing an integrated and inclusive AI program (Astra Health), designed to help clinicians document consultations more efficiently while harnessing next-generation technology to improve the delivery of patient care.

What do you see as some of the enablers and barriers to health innovation in primary care in Australia?
Health innovation is already at the forefront of general practice, with technology advancing at a rapid pace. As clinicians, we need to embrace these tools and use them to deliver better care – just as surgeons have adopted robotics and radiologists are already using AI and advanced imaging modalities. As GPs, we should be equally open to progress, treating it as part of our ongoing professional development.

The biggest barrier, in my view, is concern about confidentiality and privacy. While these concerns are valid, there are straightforward measures that can take to address them. For example, when I use Astra Health in my practice, I ensure no patient-identifiable data is linked to the transcription, I obtain consent, and I set auto-deletion for transcriptions after 48 hours.Another barrier is scepticism about quality. Many GPs remain unconvinced that AI can produce better notes than their own. I believe AI is still in its early stages, but with more users, more data, and continuous refinement, its output will rapidly improve.

What do you think the future of general practice looks like?
General practice will only get more demanding. Many established GPs and practices I speak to are booked out days in advance, making it nearly impossible for patients to get same-day appointments with their regular GP for acute issues. This creates risk, patients may see another doctor unfamiliar with their history or turn to already overburdened emergency departments.

By incorporating health innovation and technology into everyday practice, we can increase efficiency, see more patients, improve communication with colleagues, and maintain the work–life balance that makes general practice sustainable and rewarding.

Why is it important GPs are involved in health innovation/new technology design?
Innovation and technology are the future of general practice, and clinicians must have a strong voice in shaping them. We need more doctors on the front line identifying real-world challenges and contributing to solutions that make technology practical, safe, and effective in day-to-day practice.

What would you say to early career doctors about general practice/primary healthcare?
General practice is a highly underrated career. It offers me control over my time and the ability to make a meaningful impact on my community’s health. While it has its challenges, it is deeply rewarding.  Although I am committed to my profession and my patients, I am also available for my family, find time to maintain my fitness, and pursue hobbies I enjoy. It’s a career that offers both professional fulfilment and a balanced lifestyle.