Dr Louise Stone
About Louise
Dr Louise Stone has been a GP in rural and urban settings for the last 35 years, beginning her GP career in South Gippsland, Victoria. She has had multiple other roles in teaching, research and policy, including a decade leading GP training, as the Senior Medical Advisor at General Practice Education and Training (GPET).
Louise is currently practicing in Canberra, and is also a Professor in the Adelaide Rural Clinical School, where she is leading a large project on the experience of women GPs at the end of their careers. She is a qualitative researcher, who has led projects on mental health, doctors’ health, medical education and professionalism. She is known for her innovative medical education methods, and her writing.
In her clinical work, she is often working with people with complex mental and physical health needs, possibly because she spent a decade getting a PhD looking at how GPs manage people with medically unexplained symptoms.
Dr Louise Stone
“I’ve always believed that the standard you walk past is the standard you accept.”
Louise's Journey
Louise started her career at Sydney University, where for some crazy reason she decided it was a good idea to do medicine of a day and an arts degree in psychology at night. Having grown up in an industrial city as the first of her family to go to University, she had no idea how complex this journey would be. She was a mediocre medical student, possibly because she was a little bewildered by medical training culture, until she met Charles Bridges Webb, the Professor of General Practice, perched in a tiny run-down cottage at the edge of Lidcombe hospital. She excelled in this one discipline, and her career choice was decided.
From Sydney, Louise fled as far away as possible, doing a term with the RFDS in Broken Hill. With characteristic honesty, she informed the nurses that she knew nothing useful yet, but promised to work hard if they were prepared to help her learn. They generously did, and cemented her interest in rural practice.
Louise started her career as a very inexperienced GP obstetrician in Gippsland, with the extraordinary support of a team of inspirational supervisors, not only from medicine, but also from nursing. In a way, those rural clinicians shaped her career, because it was their kindness and commitment that helped her gain the confidence to grow as a clinician, but also as a teacher.
She was fortunate to be given a role at Monash University when she was quite young, and was one of the first few employees at ACRRM. She remembers the experience of having to travel three and a half hours into Melbourne for compulsory education sessions in her training with a very young baby, and this shaped her commitment to rural GP education. It seemed deeply unfair to require registrars like me to travel to urban centres for their training, and she felt even more strongly for her colleagues in Western Queensland and WA, where the distances were greater.
Since then, she has designed, taught and led several Masters degrees and short courses in mental health, rural health, research and medical humanities. She has worked for several Universities, PHNs, State and Federal government and both Colleges. She recently published her first book, Sexual harassment in medicine: healing medical cultures around the world published by Cambridge University Press, and including over 60 authors from 23 countries.
Awards, Honours, and Accolades
Louise's Qualifications
Bachelor of Medicine
University of Sydney
Bachelor of Surgery
University of Sydney
Bachelor of Arts
University of Sydney
Masters of Public Health
University of Wollongong
Masters of Qualitative Health Research
University of Sydney
Masters of Science in Healthcare Transformation
University of Texas
Doctor of Philosophy
University of Sydney
Diploma
Royal Australian College of Obstetricians and Gynaecologists
Graduate Diploma of Family Medicine
Monash University
Fellowship
Royal Australian College of General Practitioners
Fellowship
Australian College of Rural and Remote Medicine
Fellowship
Australian Society of Psychological Medicine
Louise's Awards
Medal for performance in General Practice
University of Sydney
YOGIE award for outstanding contribution to young people
Youth Coalition of the ACT
Community and Family
Louise and her husband have worked around the country, in NSW, Victoria and the ACT. With their three children, Louise has managed holidays by working as a locum, and teaching in a variety of settings. She must be one of few people who is gold frequent flyer, despite rarely travelling overseas. She has the dubious distinction of being able to draw the layouts of dozens of Australian airports, including tiny ones that only open a few times a day.
Louise was relocated to the city early in her career, due to a family illness that needed expert tertiary care. Finding herself back in Sydney, she kept her rural aspirations alive by designing and running workshops with RVTS and ACRRM. Being in Canberra has its advantages. Not only does it give her a chance to advocate for a variety of GP causes with politicians and policy makers, it is also easy to escape the city.
Louise has three grown daughters who are not doctors, and keep her grounded. One makes exceptionally good coffee, another is a master of organisation and a third seems to be able to dredge up an ancient story for any concept that is difficult to explain.
She is also a crazy cat lady, with Teddy who keeping her sane but insisting on photobombing when she needs to get photos done for newspaper articles.
“They taught me how to be a doctor – but more importantly, they taught me how to look after people.”
Louise's Story
When looking back over her career, there is a thread of advocacy that travels through her life and work.
“I guess I’ve always felt that the standard you walk past is the standard you accept” she says. “I got started in mental health because I was the first woman GP in my rural general practice, and there were rural women who had felt unable to share some of their needs with their excellent GPs. I remember one older woman breaking down when I asked if she had children, and she explained that she had had a stillbirth, but has never felt able to grieve that loss because she wasn’t allowed to see the baby. We were able to find where the baby was buried and with a sympathetic local minister, we had a small ceremony to allow her to say goodbye. That, and many other experiences taught me that rural practice was broader and deeper than medicine”.
Since then, Louise has led several projects exploring issues she has faced clinically or educationally. Her PhD focussed on the way novice and experienced GPs manage patients with medically unexplained symptoms, because it was a common concern of participants in her mental health courses. She led a project on youth mental health services, because she was working with young people who couldn’t navigate complex healthcare systems. Her work on sexual harassment was triggered by an intern who had been assaulted by her boss, and she couldn’t find any helpful resources to assist her and the intern to manage the trauma.
She never planned her career. “I guess I’ve always enjoyed variety” she says “so I’ve kept taking on different opportunities and gradually constructed a career. I don’t think I had any idea how my career would pan out.”
Louise's Writing
Louise has always written articles and educational material, but during the pandemic, she found it confronting to hear young, talented GPs say that they were “failing”.
“They weren’t failing” she says “the system was failing them, so I started to write opinion pieces describing what was happening with the changes in expectations, policies, attitudes and healthcare services. As a medical educator, the one talent I really value is the ability to describe things that are complex and often unconscious. So I started writing pieces for Medical Republic, MJA Insight and others to explain what it is that we GPs do, and why it is becoming so difficult.”
She believes that understanding the systems in which GPs work is essential to their health and wellbeing. She also believes that politicians and policy makers have always had difficulty understanding what it is GPs do. Louise strongly believes that problems can only be solved if they are well understood. Doctors’ health relies on understanding what they can change, and what they can do with structures that are not within their control.
“The resilience narrative has done a lot of harm” she says “sure, it’s important to look after yourself but you can’t overcome structural inequities with a bit of yoga. Resilience is often described as the ability to bounce back after adversity. But the ability of a ball to bounce depends on the context in which it is required to bounce. Even a superball can’t bounce in a swamp.”
What’s next?
As a GP with a lifetime of diverse experience, Louise is keen to capture this moment in time for future generations.
“I’m working with the National Library to begin an oral history project, capturing the experience of GPs who are ending their careers at this time of significant change. I think it is critical that we capture this moment, before this generation retires and takes all of that experience with them. Perhaps it is because I’m now becoming so senior that I recognise the importance of describing this profession in all its complexity. I am so fortunate to have worked with extraordinary doctors, from my first supervisors to my junior colleagues, and I want others to see what breadth and depth they offer the Australian community every day”
