Long-serving Gundagai doctor Paul Mara has been recognised for his contribution to rural healthcare over more than three decades in this year’s Australia Day Honours list.
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Dr Mara has been inducted as a member of the Order of Australia (AM) for significant service to medicine, particularly through the recruitment and retention of medical practitioners in rural and remote areas.
He has served as a GP in Gundagai, both in his own practice and at the region’s hospitals, since the early 1980s and was a founding executive member of the Rural Doctors Association of Australia (RDAA).
Though he possesses a CV of rural health achievements without peer, a humble Dr Mara told the Advertiser on Monday his wife Virginia should have been the one to receive the honour.
“She’s the one who holds the fort, the one that’s got the head and the shoulders above the crowd,” he said.
“It’s been a team effort right throughout the process with what we’ve done.”
Dr Mara’s highest-profile role on the national stage was his tenure as the president of the RDAA from 2010 to 2012.
“It was incredibly frustrating at first,” he said of the role.
“It’s one of those things if you keep plodding along, you do make changes and you have an input.”
He also served as the RDAA’s inaugural vice-president when it was founded in 1991 and has held senior executive roles in the Rural Doctors Association of NSW, including a short stint as its president in the early 1990s.
Dr Mara said he’d seen rural healthcare in Australia completely change since he started out in the sector in the early 1980s.
He pinpointed the rural doctors dispute of 1987 as a major turning point – an event which served as a circuit-breaker that restored “a degree of respectability” to the rural health agenda.
“We started to have a rural health agenda in NSW after that,” Dr Mara said.
Despite having been involved in rural health advocacy for more than three decades now, Dr Mara said he had no plans to slow down.
“I’m not going to leave now – we’ve started to get things right,” he said.
Dr Mara said the main challenges for the rural healthcare agenda were to look at how adequate resources from the sector could be put in place to enable people to move out of the cities and spread out.
