Dr Kate calls time on long career as community GP

After 37 years at Kawau Bay Health (KBH), Dr Kate Baddock has decided the time is right to retire and will officially hang up her stethoscope on March 31.

The dedicated and much-loved general practitioner has worked tirelessly for the Rodney community at the two KBH clinics – Warkworth Medical Centre, where she is one of five partners who own and operate the practice, and Snells Beach Medical Centre.

Baddock says she still enjoys practising medicine but wants to retire while she’s still young and fit enough to do all the things she wants to outside of work.

“I’m about to go to the Himalayas for six weeks and then later in the year I’m doing a 1000km-walk in Western Australia – these are the sorts of things you can’t do as easily when you’re older,” she says.

When Baddock started her tenure with KBH in 1988, she says the Warkworth practice was just a little weatherboard house with a house next door on the corner of Alnwick and Percy Streets, where the surgery used to be.

“So that little house got knocked down first and the surgery that’s here now got built. Then the surgery that was on the corner got demolished and the rest of the medical centre was constructed and opened in 2010.”

Baddock also saw the Snells Beach practice expand significantly.

“When I first worked at Snells, the vets were at the front and the surgery was in the back. Then the surgery grew so much the vets had to move out and we took over the entire building,” she says.

“It was never really fit for purpose and we moved into a brand-new building just before covid, which was constructed in 2019 with state-of-the-art facilities.”

Baddock has faced many other challenges over the years in her career – not least being on 24-hour call.

“We did 24-hour callouts for 25 years and also obstetrics so we delivered babies on-call as well.

“When I was having my own children, which was between 1990 and 1995, I was still on-call and on one occasion I was up in the middle of the night feeding my baby and got a call to do a delivery, so took my baby along with me.”

So what’s the secret to Baddock’s longevity as a GP living and working in the same community as her patients?

“Outside of the practice, I might be the mum, the gymnastics coach, the hockey coach, the hockey player, or I might just be the person doing the supermarket shopping, but I’m not the doctor,” she says.

“And I have to say the community has bought into this. I’ve had my home number in the phone directory all this time and I’ve only ever received one call from someone looking for a doctor.”
Baddock says once she’s retired, she’ll miss the daily contact of seeing 30 to 35 patients.

“I want to thank the people of Warkworth, the great Warkworth community, for the privilege of being able to be part of their lives for so long and to share their lives from, in many instances, from birth to death.

“It’s been a long association. And it’s a huge privilege to have been a part of people’s lives like that.”