GP24: Fellowship and Awards ceremony oration

This oration is given every year at the conclusion of the Fellowship and Awards ceremony, and the orator is chosen by the Faculty based in the same region as the conference for that year.

GP24: the Conference for General Practice was held in Te Whanganui-a-Tara Wellington and our Wellington Faculty asked Dr Lucy O’Hagan to give the address.

Lucy is a GP at OraToa in Cannons Creek, Porirua, and has been involved with the College’s medical education programme for over 25 years.

She is regular columnist for NZ Doctor where she uses the power of storytelling to reflect on the complexities of being a GP. She openly shares her personal experience of burnout and has recently recorded ‘Waiting for Covid’ a collection of stories about being a GP during the pandemic.

In her oration, Lucy talked about grace and belief saying these are not two words that are often used in the same sentence as medicine or general practice – but they matter greatly.

Being a GP requires grace. Grace means to be calm, at ease, witnessing the suffering that walks through the door. To be graceful in a consultation might mean we tread lightly and nimbly, steady in the face of whatever comes.

Belief is hope, trust that things can get better. Belief that this patient has the capacity to step forward into a new story. Belief that some power bigger than us, will spread some magic. And magic happens. Belief might be the most powerful medicine we have.

She finished off the oration with sharing what she would write in a letter to her younger self, including:

• Be a good diagnostician, but don’t deliver your diagnoses too proudly, you’ll be backtracking in a nanosecond
• Observe your nurses, they could teach you a thing or two.
• Sit in the waiting room once in your life, and witness the power of welcome, and the sound of grace down a telephone.
• Know your colleagues.
• Hold hope like a life depends on it. It might.
• It’s not all about you.