A small town in regional Western Australia will keep its only doctor after she backflipped on her decision to resign over the ongoing impact of power outages on the GP practice.
General practitioner Nalini Rao has worked in Mullewa, an hour's drive north-east of Geraldton, for almost seven years.
On Tuesday, Dr Rao gave two months' notice of her resignation.
She is one of many residents who are at breaking point at the frequent power outages over more than a decade.
A recent outage in the region saw more than 24,000 homes and businesses in Geraldton, Northampton, Dongara, Mullewa, and surrounding areas lose power for about six hours.
But speaking on ABC Mornings today, Dr Rao said her resignation had been a "knee-jerk reaction" and she has since reconsidered.
"I had a call and [the City of Greater Geraldton] said there is actually a solution. I can register my business with Western Power, and they will actually provide a generator," she said.
"The [GP] building doesn't belong to me, so I need permission to do anything. I did bring my little portable [generator] in once, but the system is so sophisticated that it just wouldn't work.
"I don't want to leave the community … I love the community, I love the job."
Dr Rao said power reliability issues were not the only challenges regional GPs faced.
"You do emergency, I do ambulance volunteering. I don't have a nurse because there is just none to be had," she said.
"I run a pharmacy because the pharmacy closed years ago.
"Some of us do it because we love being here. It's not for everyone but there's nowhere else I'd rather be."
Geraldton Mayor Shane Van Styn said the City welcomed Dr Rao's decision to stay in Mullewa.
"She's been a great, loyal servant to our township of Mullewa and we are delighted to hear she is going to work through this issue now," he said.
Mr Van Styn said the local government shared Dr Rao's frustrations.
"The City has at the medical service provided everything. We have about eight hours of capacity inside the medical centre that we fund as ratepayers," he said.
"This is worth getting to [the situation] where we need a generator to back up the back-up generators in the Midwest.
"You wonder how many generators we are going to have to have in a small town like Mullewa to keep the lights on."
He said he was "troubled" by the lack of support from the state government to fund regional medical practices.
"It's mind-boggling that we see local governments right across WA having to fund health services and in this instance, even being requested to run the electricity service," he said.
"The burden on small townships with small rate bases to deliver state government services is outrageous."
State-owned energy supplier Western Power has said it would spend $4 million on replacing infrastructure in Mullewa, with some outages planned to protect workers' safety.
The utility has said it planned to install an additional distribution unit in Deepdale later this year to improve power reliability for homes and businesses on the Mullewa feeder line.
The new unit will be automated and will allow workers to restore power remotely.
