Community
27 March, 2025
Altree set to lead
TERANG Medical Clinic will welcome Dr Jacqueline Altree as the practice’s new owner later this year, keeping the town’s lone clinic in local hands.
Terang Medical Clinic announced last week owner Dr Tim Fitzpatrick would stand down from the end of June, after more than 34 years with the practice.
Dr Altree, who has been with the practice since 2018, said she has long known there may be an opportunity to take on the responsibility as one of the town’s GPs with an interest in remaining in the community long-term.
She said while Dr Fitzpatrick had given her plenty of time to decide, taking the leap was no less daunting.
“Tim has been here for 34 years and those are big shoes to fill, and I wasn’t sure if I could fill them,” Dr Altree said.
“But I felt if he has confidence in me, I should have the confidence in myself to say yes.
“It was always in the back of my mind that I was working in a clinic where the GP population was getting older – Tim was the only senior GP and we had a couple of registrars, while Dr Neil Jackson was working in the other clinic.
“I thought if I was going to be working here long-term there would need to be a succession plan, so it’s not like it was sprung on me out of the blue.”
Following the announcement, hundreds of comments of support for both Dr Fitzpatrick and Dr Altree came flooding in.
“It’s been very touching,” Dr Altree said.
“People have come up and expressed their congratulations, which has been a little overwhelming because it came as a surprise people had that level of regard.
“I just do my job, so it’s nice to know people believed I could make the transition to practice owner.”
Dr Altree said while the transition was a big step, she could approach it with confidence knowing the existing team at Terang Medical Clinic worked as a cohesive unit to ensure the smooth delivery of service.
“I’m a GP, first and foremost, and I love my job” she said.
“Being a practice owner is very much a team effort – and Tim has been the same, he’s first and foremost a GP and the ownership side of things is not his primary interest.
“But we have a practice manager in Abby Hawken who is an absolute genius, she’s so capable and I wouldn’t have said yes without someone who is so business minded and interested in doing that sort of work.
“That lets me get on with being a GP, but there’s a wide range of complexity we need to be over from contracts to insurance – the responsibility of ensuring billing is enough to pay staff.
“There’s a lot of legal and financial aspects, but we have staff who are capable of helping guide us through.”
Dr Altree said a point of emphasis in her decision to assume ownership was to ensure the practice did not fall in to corporate hands, citing the harm Lyndoch Living had done to the Terang community through their decision to shut down May Noonan Aged Care Centre.
“One of the things that made me say yes when Tim offered to see me the practice was I wanted to make sure it wasn’t a corporate company coming in here,” she said.
“I think we’re all still a bit scarred from what happened over at May Noonan.
“Corporate-owned practice feels different and I wouldn’t necessarily want our patients being reliant on a corporate model which I don’t think aligns well with our community.
“We view Terang Medical Clinic as a community asset.”
Dr Altree said she strongly believed in ownership models which prioritised patients over profits.
“There’s something different about medicine where it’s not just a business – it’s not like buying a bakery or hairdresser,” she said.
“It works differently, and when the motive in health becomes profit a lot of things change for the worse.
“They don’t feel the same level of responsibility for their staff, and corporate often has billing targets which require seeing a certain number of patients per hour or per day to maintain profitability.
“The patients we see are often complex with lots of different parts, or seeing different health care providers.
“If you’re going to do six-minute medicine you get more, but I can’t even say hello in five minutes.”
Despite the desire to maintain the consistency patients of Terang Medical Clinic have come to expect, Dr Altree said the clinic would continue to look for new avenues to heighten care and community involvement.
“There are things we can do to extend on from what people expect from us,” she said.
“We’re well placed for our traditional care, but I can see a direction of heightening our community involvement.
“I understand the desire to keep things the same, to not completely rebuild the model that we have here, but I also think there are ways traditional general practice can be expanded.”
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