Family doctor says goodbye after four decades

Growing up, Dr Sneyd lived in India, Syria, and Italy, finally landing in Shepparton in the 1980s.

He came to the area to complete his family medicine training and gain a Diploma of Obstetrics and Gynecology.

Eventually, he decided to stay.

“I wanted a regional area,” Dr Sneyd said.

He’d trained in Melbourne and was used to the notoriously fickle weather.

In Shepparton, he said he woke up to blue skies and sunshine well into April.

He discovered the tennis courts, the golf course, and all the region had to offer.

In December of 1984, Dr Sneyd joined the team at Wyndham House Clinic, and he has since enjoyed being involved with multiple generations of local families over the decades.

“Medicine today is continually evolving and changing,” he said.

“But nothing beats the personal contact with people and their extended families that you have in a regional practice.”

Knowing families as a whole, and the community in which they live, helped him to have a better overall understanding of his patients’ health, Dr Sneyd said.

The personal contact is one of the things he said he’d miss most during his retirement.

Although he’d been preparing for this moment for a while, Dr Sneyd said it didn’t really sink in until he finished up on Wednesday.

“I felt a little bit lost when I walked out the door for the last time,” he said.

As he ends his career as a GP, Dr Sneyd is hopeful about his field.

He is passionate about training the next generation of doctors and has long worked with medical students from the University of Melbourne, shepherding his successors through the final years of their training.

“General practice does seem to be undergoing a bit of a resurgence,” he said.

“People are coming back into the fold, which is lovely.”

But Dr Sneyd does worry about how difficult it has become to run a private practice like Wyndham House Clinic.

“Medicine has become so much more government regulated,” he said.

He said doctors who are running a practice are also running a business, and they have to work out how to employ and pay good staff.

“The funding in the last 15 to 20 years has been so much more difficult.”

Dr Sneyd said young doctors don’t want to go out and buy, or start, a practice of their own because it’s so hard.

In larger regional towns and metro areas that likely won’t have a huge impact, he said, but that’s not true everywhere.

“Smaller rural communities will find they have to travel further and further to get medical care,” he said.

Dr Sneyd said it’s become exceedingly difficult for GPs to run their own practices.

In part, that’s why one of the things he’s proudest of over the past 40 years is keeping the Wyndham House practice going, retaining good people, and having a good relationship with staff who often stayed for many years.

As he turns the page on this chapter of his life, Dr Sneyd said he’d be spending more time with his family, including his grandchildren.

He also plans to spend more time on the golf course, and in the garden.

“I’m not going to be short of things to do,” he said.