Professor Jennifer Reath
General Practitioner
Peter Brennan Chair of General Practice at the University of Western Sydney
I am a General Practitioner working in Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander health. Even as a medical student at the University of Queensland it seemed to me that Aboriginal health was an area where there was an opportunity to make a difference. I always wanted to understand why things were so and how things could be improved.
It's vitally important that we as GPs practicing in primary healthcare make sure that the evidence we use is based in our communities and in our practices.
I think clinical trials are incredibly important in providing evidence for what we do every day in general practice. We rely on that quality of evidence to guide us in terms of management across so many areas of medicine, things like use of medications in heart disease, diabetes management, in stroke prevention, all of the decisions we make day to day in general practice are based on that evidence. Where we don't have that evidence it's much more challenging in clinical practice to know that you're doing the best thing you can for your patients.