CAROLINE HARKER

When Wanaka GP Dr Lucy O’Hagan was asked for a bio as part of her application to study narrative medicine through Boston’s Centre for Narrative Practice, this is what she wrote:

I have been a small town doctor for nearly 20 years.

I mainly give out tissues and condoms. And tend the wounded. Sometimes at night.

I thought I would change medicine -

I did not realise medicine would change me - for better or for worse.

I like problems but prefer solutions.

I am driven by curiosity -

I have learnt that things are seldom what they seem.

I am the keeper of the town's secrets

And the towns criers,

And I put plasters on.

Lucy enjoyed the course so much she has decided to continue her studies in narrative practise with a Masters in General Practice at Otago University. She talked to the Wanaka App about what narrative practise is.

"I am intrigued by the idea that humans make sense of their world through stories, that we narrate ourselves into being. I sense that medical encounters are just a moment in time in a narrative that holds both past and future. Our assessments are often divorced from the story, static images through a particular lens.

"I want to use narrative principles in teaching family physicians about clinical encounters. I want to think more about the doctor’s narrative, my own; about the sort of stories doctors inhabit, the stories they are allowed to speak of, the stories that get status, how doctors narrate themselves into being.”

Earlier this year Lucy gave a talk about the role of narrative in general practice at a medical educators’ conference. The talk caught the attention of many, including Royal College of General Practitioners CEO Helen Morgan-Banda, who decided to nominate Lucy for the college’s prestigious Eric Elder medal. 

College communications advisor Janaya Soma was also at the conference. "Lucy gave a fantastic address,” she told the Wanaka App. "Her talk was amusing and funny, but also made a great contribution and encouraged people to think about the future of general practice. She explained how the skill of listening and storytelling fits into that.”

Lucy was asked to speak about narrative again at the college’s annual conference, and it was there she was presented with the Eric Elder medal by college president Tim Malloy, who congratulated her on her "lateral thinking always tempered by wisdom”. "I was a bit stunned because I didn’t know it was coming,” Lucy said afterwards.

In her talk "Narrating Our Selves” Lucy encouraged fellow doctors to adopt a more ‘reflective, patient-centred doctor narrative’ in their general practise. She said the dominant narrative taught in medical school, which she termed the ‘biomedical brain box narrative’, projects an image of a doctor who is a "highly competitive cognitive expert diagnostician who knows what to do and gets the dose right”.

However, she said, this narrative does not welcome other ways of seeing or being a doctor. She asked her fellow GPs to reflect on the question: "Do we want to be factory-farmed doctors sitting alone in individual cells looking straight ahead, fed the diet of evidence and objectivity and measured in terms of our productivity? Or do we want to be free-range doctors choosing our diet, roaming freely with each other seeing the world from different perspectives?”

The Eric Elder medal honours Dr Eric Elder, a GP who lived and worked in Tuatapere for 60 years. He was known as the grandfather of vocational training for general practice in New Zealand, creating rural training programmes and pioneering the use of peer review. Ironically Lucy grew up in Southland where her father John was also a GP who worked alongside Eric Elder.

After practising medicine in Wanaka for 20 years, Lucy sold her practice in 2015. She now divides her time between homes in Hawea Flat and Dunedin where she continues to work at various practices as well as teaching GPs and studying.

PHOTO: Lizzi Yates