Dr Al-Obaidi is the RACGP GP Advocate for Victoria’s Greenvale District. He began his medical training in Baghdad, completed his residency on the Central Coast of NSW, and now practises in the Macedon Ranges of Victoria as a FRACGP. He’s Brooke St Medical’s Clinical Lead and Digital Health Champion. His clinical focus is preventive health, and outside the clinic he designs and vibe codes his own health-tech apps, a rare combination of medicine and software skills that shapes how he thinks about the future of general practice.
What made you want to become an Advocate?
There’s a lot that’s rewarding about GP work, and a lot that’s broken. You feel both every week. And everywhere I look, people are frustrated: on the Facebook groups, in the tearoom, at meetings.
At some point I thought, if I don’t do it and no one else does, how does anything actually change? I’ve been like this since school, honestly. I was the kid who spoke up when my friends and I got a raw deal. So it’s a bit of an instinct now, wanting to fix things and make them run better.
I believe in the 1% rule; Change one small thing, keep at it, and over time it compounds into something real. That’s what I’m here to do for general practice.
You have a broad range of special interests, is there one in particular that feeds into your advocacy?
My special interest is generalism. Ironic, I know, but it’s true.
Generalism, and whole-person care is my job. On a normal day I’m chasing an orthopaedic surgeon about a patient stuck on the public waiting list, then sorting out the medication side with their nephrologist and cardiologist. That’s advocacy, it’s just advocacy for one patient at a time.
The GP Advocate Network is no different. General practice sits at the centre of a patient’s care and we know them better than anyone else in the chain, so we’re best placed to speak for them.
The other half is less glamorous: communicating well, written and spoken, and understanding how the machine actually works. Knowing who to talk to and when matters as much as what you’re saying.
You’ve worked in a range of general practices over the past decade; low resource settings, rural clinics, bulk billing and private practices. What challenges are shared by GPs across these different environments?
Two things show up everywhere. Burnout and job satisfaction, and a quiet ambivalence about how general practice is funded.
Like most doctors, I want the same thing every clinic day: to give my patients the best care I can. Sitting underneath that is a running negotiation. If I spend a good 15–20 minutes in the consult doing my best, should I charge privately? Do I feel guilty billing them? What if they can’t afford it, and is that my problem? Do I bulk bill because the system isn’t funded well enough for me to practise the way I want to, then absorb the cost myself so they don’t miss out?
GPs do this constantly. Goodwill only gets you so far. You learn to adapt, but for a lot of doctors that’s exactly where the burnout starts.
What’s a recent moment of advocacy success for you?
It’d have to be my first meeting with my local MP, Iwan Walters, the Member for Greenvale in Melbourne’s north. It went better than I expected.
We talked for a good 40 minutes, very casually. He was pleasantly surprised that I’d reached out at all, and he welcomed the RACGP’s advocacy. Then he asked a lot of questions. I found myself explaining the practical side: how general practice actually works, how we’re funded, what it takes for a practice to stay open. There were some genuine eye-opening moments in there for him.
I’ve kept in touch since. A couple of emails and updates, most recently the Sax Institute report on pharmacy prescribing outcomes, which he was keen to see the evidence on.
What’s your biggest tip for successful advocacy?
My tip is simple. Be genuine and just reach out. You’re a GP, you’re a professional, and you’re well regarded in your community. Politicians appreciate hearing from doctors who care about their work and the people they look after.
We also need to come together and support each other. There are more than 40,000 GPs in this country, more than any other specialty group, and we still don’t lobby like it.
Part of that is we’re split: Bulk billing and private billing, employed and contractor, rural and metro. We feel the same problems differently, so we end up arguing about the solution instead of agreeing on the problem. But the problem is the same everywhere. And 40,000 people saying one thing at once is hard to ignore.