DR MELANIE DORRINGTON

Special interests: Melanie's interests within general practice are sexual and reproductive health, healthcare for vulnerable and disadvantaged people, and family and domestic violence. Melanie is also interested in advocacy, not just for her patients, but she is driven to improve the health system for the whole community.

Dr Melanie Dorrington clinically works as a GP at Interchange Health Co-Operative one day per week, seeing mainly patients with chronic and complex conditions who are from vulnerable or disadvantaged population groups.

 Melanie is also the Chief GP and Primary Care Advisor for ACT Health Directorate four days per week. In this she leads the Office of General Practice and Primary Care (OGPPC), within the Office of Professional Leadership and Education (OPLE). Across OPLE we have shared interests such as workforce planning, reform, recruitment, and retention. We want to work together to ensure there is a whole of system approach to health care in the ACT. In the OGPPC we work with other teams across the health directorate, providing a general practitioner specific lens when considering health polices, planning, and services. We also work with the ANU on medical student placements in general practice and provide funding for GPs to supervise the students in these placements. The team also administers the Kindergarten Health Checks.

Melanie decided on general practice training during her Pre-vocational General Practice Placement Program rotation in internship, which she completed with Interchange General Practice, where the work of a GP was demonstrated to be complex, fulfilling and meaningful because you got to know patients personally. She saw how the GPs there were making their work their own with their specific interests –almost all part-time and mixing various other roles in with their part-time general practice, from forensic medicine to government advisor, from HIV medicine to refugee health, and researchers and academics.

Melanie has worked across a variety of practice settings – mainstream city private practice, Aboriginal Health Service, rural private practice, Women’s Health Service, SHFPACT, telehealth women’s health (early medical abortion) clinic, and an NGO bulk-billing service.

She also has a background in research prior to studying medicine, and experience in several non-clinical roles, including academic GP registrar, Clinical Editor for ACT/SNSW HealthPathways, GP Liaison Officer for the Monaro region of SNSWLHD, acting GP Policy Advisor for ACT Health, acting Director of the Academic Unit of General Practice, and Clinical Director of a telehealth women’s health service.