Months after giving birth at the age of 22, Rose Petrohilos looked to their uncle for inspiration to pursue the "family business" of medicine.
"For the majority of his medical career he was in a wheelchair and he was disabled, so he couldn't walk," Rose said.
"He could empathise so much more directly with patients ... he did often have patients who were grateful to be like, 'This is a doctor who sees me, he sees my experience'."
Rose grew up in Victoria's rural south-west where she was home-schooled until the age of 15, when she left to move to the Gold Coast.
There, at the age of 16, Rose met the man who would later become their husband and married him at age 18.
After the first few months of getting used to parenthood, Rose, who identifies as gender-diverse and uses both she/her and they/them pronouns, decided to study medicine.
"When I sort of started emerging from the fog, I had this strong sense of purpose," Rose said.
"I was very motivated for how to change our lives for the better and that led me down a road to medicine."
Rose, who is no longer married, has since moved back to regional Victoria, where they are undertaking a placement at Bairnsdale Regional Health Service.
Like her uncle Michael Petrohilos, Rose feels her personal experience helps her identify more closely with her patients.
"I identify as a person — I take from everybody's story. I don't feel lacking for role models. I feel like everybody can be a role model to me in their own unique way," Rose said.
But Rose does not want her identity to get in the way of the job at hand.
"What tends to happen more is people worry that, 'Oh, no, I've misgendered you' and then they feel kind of guilty, and that can get in the way of your therapeutic relationship," Rose said.
"The exception I will make to that is when I do engage with gender diverse or queer youth, I find that it is a case where making that disclosure of 'You're in a safe space, I also identify as gender diverse and queer' can be really helpful to them because that makes them feel safe."
Rose believes a structural shift in the way medicine is taught in Australia has opened the way for more minorities to take up the career.
"A lot of that's been driven by the transition to postgraduate medical degrees instead of just undergraduate degrees," Rose said.
Structural move toward diversity
Data from the Medical Schools Outcomes Database showed there were eight final-year medical students who described their gender identity as non-binary in 2022.
The database asks questions about the background, education, and future plans of medical students and is one of the key measures of the diversity of the future workforce.
Australian Medical Council president Geoff McColl said medicine historically had problems recruiting people from diverse backgrounds.
"We saw particularly 20 years ago with those students coming more from private schools — not exclusively, of course — but there wasn't perhaps the diversity that we desire for our medical workforce," he said.
Around that time, the University of Melbourne opened Australia's first graduate degree, where entrants would be considered not only on academic performance or ATAR, but also broader life experience.
Professor McColl said more than 15 years later, the majority of courses were now graduate degrees.
"That diversity of experience enhances their ability to practise medicine, it probably alters their choices of where and what type of practice they want to engage in," he said.
Professor McColl said the hope was also to encourage regional and rural people into medical school, as they were more likely to return to the country.
At the end of last year, the Australian Medical Association projected there would be a shortage of 10,600 general practitioners by 2031 without changes to policy settings, with the shortages to be felt most sharply in regional Australia.
Professor McColl said while the move to graduate degrees did lengthen the training period for doctors, the benefits were worthwhile.
"If you add up the undergraduate program with the graduate program, they are a couple of years longer than, let's say, the shortest undergraduate program, but you're also gaining that diversity of approach," Professor McColl said.
"I think the proof of the pudding will be in another five to 10 years when we see the diversity of the workforce coming through."
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