"I wanted to make a difference in under served communities"

David Homewood is a junior doctor and Medrecruit locum. We caught up with him to find out about his locum year (spent travelling Australia in a van) and how this helped him decide on his career path.

What is the why that drives you to come into work each day and work as a doctor?

I grew up in Geelong (like an hour south of Melbourne) in between Geelong and the surf coast which was a pretty idyllic childhood with lots of beach time! And then I moved to Melbourne for uni and then work.

Getting into medicine was a long and windy road. I originally wanted to do music while I was at school. I was really into jazz music so I applied for the VCA and a couple of other jazz schools and didn’t get in, so I was a bit like... What am I going to do with my life?

So I took a year off and travelled around Europe and had some time in Asia and whilst I was there I had a bit of time to reflect. Then I did a few years of my undergrad degree and fell in love with the science of medicine. I worked in a GP practice and just saw the tangible difference that doctors make in people's lives and that tangibility, as well as medicine in general, just really drew me to it.

I started off in Melbourne in a busy inner-city hospital and did my internship and surgical resident year there, this year I decided to take a year off, travel around Australia and work for Medrecruit.

One of my friends referred me to Medrecruit, to Eliza who is my agent, and that was when I was thinking about taking a year off. I was just really tired, with all the Covid lockdowns, and huge hours I just felt like I needed some time off.

I didn’t really know what I wanted to do within medicine so I thought if I had some time off, did a bit of travelling, and had some time to think that would be good. So in 2021, I bought a van and retrofitted it throughout the year, and then in 2022 headed off on a locum year.

What is the why that keeps you going when you are feeling burned out or exhausted?

I think the best thing for me, was that locuming allowed me autonomy. I could go where I wanted, work as much, (or as little), as I wanted, and had the chance to work in different places. There was some really interesting work too. I worked in Lismore doing some ICU stuff, I worked in the Gold Coast doing orthopedics for six weeks, did some different ward cover jobs, and now I have decided that I am thinking about Urology. I communicated that to my agent (Eliza) and three weeks later two months of work popped up at the Sunshine Coast University Hospital which I am pretty excited about so that will be later in the year.

How will Medrecruit support your "Why? in 2024"

Now I’ve decided that I want to do urology I have been lining up a research year in Europe and I have just come back from over there. Having the time to do that sort of thing is pretty precious because as a junior doctor usually you have like four-five weeks of leave and that’s it, but if you do locum work you can take some time to figure stuff out. So I went over to the UK and followed a urologist over there and I have lined up (hopefully) a research job over there. So that is my plan for 2023.