No one likes going to the dentist, but having to pay hundreds of dollars for flights just to see one makes the experience even worse.
That was the dilemma facing toothache sufferers in the remote Northern Territory town of Nhulunbuy, on the Gove Peninsula, less than two years ago when locals found themselves without a private dental practice.
The man who helped change that, Dr Jijesh Nhalila Valappil, said at the time, dental patients would have to go to the emergency department at the hospital and would then be flown out to Darwin, Cairns or sometimes overseas to get treatment.
Dr Valappil came across the problem accidentally while travelling with a friend in Queensland when a newspaper report was brought to his attention, detailing the dental plight facing residents of Nhulunbuy.
He had never even heard of the place.
Eighteen months later and he’s now flying to the north-east Arnhem Land town to spend three days every week treating locals.
He is assisted by two dental nurses whose local knowledge and secondary employment has led to a rather unorthodox form of taking appointment bookings: in the pub and at the local supermarket.
“They are Gove locals and they work at the supermarket and also one of the nurses works at the local pub,” said Dr Valappil.
“Everyone knows they work for the dentist so they just ask them for an appointment at the supermarket or the pub.”
Nhulunbuy is a mining town that has suffered economically and socially since the loss of more than 1,000 jobs at Rio Tinto’s nearby Gove alumina refinery earlier this year.
The town has therefore attracted attention for reasons that perhaps make the town a less than desirable option for relocation.
“It’s a sad situation because lots of people are leaving even though they don’t want to. Most people in Gove are happy living there and it’s a wonderful lifestyle but because of the layoffs they have been forced to move out of town,” Dr Valappil said.
The town is very remote, and is only accessible by one 600-kilometre gravel road which is impassable in the wet season.
Flights into town are expensive, and Qantas has recently stopped its daily flights to Darwin.
Federal Government scheme helping health professionals in the bush
Despite its remote nature and the misfortune that has faced the town, Dr Valappil said it’s a beautiful place to live and when asked would he move there permanently said without hesitation: “Yes, yes most definitely”.
That would depend, however, on whether he could generate the business to run a full-time clinic.
It’s a situation typical of remote communities, which Rural Health Workforce Australia said have too few health professionals.
It estimates rural and remote Australia will continue to experience a shortage of health professionals for at least 15 years.
“Setting up a dental surgery is very expensive … and that’s one of the main reasons that dentists don’t move into regional areas because unless you have a population base to sustain a full-time practice it is very difficult to sustain that full-time practice,” Dr Valappil said.
“It’s very difficult to invest that sort of money.”
He was able to set up his Nhulunbuy practice with the help of Rural Health Workforce Australia’s Dental Relocation and Infrastructure Support Scheme (DRISS).
It aims to encourage more private dentists like Dr Valappil to make the move to rural and remote Australia.
Last year, federally funded DRISS awarded grants to 68 dentists to help with relocation and infrastructure costs.
Dr Valappil said the grant helped him put the necessary equipment in a clinic in Nhulunbuy to get started.
DRISS has been operating for one year.
Jo-anne Chapman from Rural Health Workforce Australia said that what stood out in that time was not so much the challenges dentists faced setting up in remote areas “but the innovation and creativity they’ve employed to make it work”.
“It’s about how they can make their practice work to help service remote communities,” she said.
There is perhaps no better place to start than recruiting clients in the local pub and supermarket.
DRISS will open its next funding round on 23 February 2015.