By Judith Zwolak
Argus Leader (South Dakota)
January 21, 2006
When family practice physician Vicki Walker took a year’s sabbatical from her Vermillion practice to work in Australia, she had to learn a new vocabulary for some common ailments.
“‘Crook with the wog’ means ‘sick with the flu,'” Walker explained. “I definitely had to ask some patients to clarify a few things for me when they told me about their symptoms.”
The Walkers began their adventure in December 2004, when Vicki took leave from her position at the Sioux Valley Vermillion Clinic to work for the Otway Division of Family Practice in Australia’s southeastern Victoria province. She filled in while the Aussie doctors took time off for vacation. She returned to work at Sioux Valley earlier this month.
“Not being part of the (British) Commonwealth, it was difficult for an American to get a job there,” Walker said. “But this area was considered underserved. One of the physicians told me that they had a difficult time recruiting people to the area because of the poor weather, and I thought he was kidding me.”
By Australian standards, temperatures that sometimes fall to near freezing in the winter seem nearly arctic compared to the country’s tropical northern coast.
For the South Dakota family, though, the relatively mild weather, along with stunning seashore vistas of the Indian Ocean, made the location a relative paradise.
Walker’s three children, Heather, 18, Alexa, 16, and Michael, 14, enrolled in public school there, just as their father, Lanny, had done when he was a youngster in 1979 and his father spent a year teaching in Australia through an exchange program.
“We had always talked about going to Australia and meeting my friends and visiting where our family lived,” Lanny said. “We always thought maybe we would take a three-week trip. When we looked into it, we were fortunate to find this opportunity with Vicki’s job.”
The Walkers rented a home with an ocean view in Warrnambool, a town of about 30,000 residents. While Vicki traveled to medical clinics in the region, Lanny taught as a substitute in local schools. On their free time, the family toured nearly every part of the country, from the dry, otherworldly outback to the lush Great Barrier Reef.
Although most of her patients came in with such familiar ailments as colds and stomach viruses, Vicki said she treated some exotic cases, including a swimmer with a seal bite.
“I also saw many cases of ‘surfer’s ear,’ … a bony growth in the ear caused by constant exposure to cold water,” she said.
Before her experience in Australia, Vicki said, she had never supported the idea of a single-payer health care system run by the government.
Taking part in Australia’s socialized medical system, however, changed her opinion.
“After working over there in that environment, I wholeheartedly think that socialized medicine can curb health care costs and that we should be going in that direction,” she said.
Deb Workman, a Vermillion resident whose five family members are patients of Walker’s, said she enjoyed reading dispatches about the Walkers’ experience in Australia, which the Vermillion Plain Talk newspaper ran periodically last year.
“We understood that this was an opportunity of a lifetime, and we are excited to hear about their adventures over there,” Workman said. “She’s a great doctor. We’re glad she’s back.”