Dr Kate Baddock is an extremely busy person. When she’s not holding surgeries, the Warkworth GP could be training student doctors, carrying out duties as deputy chair of the regional Auckland Rural Alliance or, most recently, speaking on national radio or TV in her latest and arguably biggest role, that of chair of the New Zealand Medical Association. She has also served on countless other medical boards and committees, is a Swimming NZ official referee and recently completed a Masters degree in Health Science. Sally Marden managed to catch up with her briefly between patient appointments to find out what drives her …
I enjoy governance and I enjoy strategic thinking. My passion for general practice and primary care, and being at the coalface and working a decent amount of time, gives me a better understanding of the primary health care environment operationally, regionally, and at a national political level. It has allowed me to bridge the entire system, from clinical care right through to policy and that’s been extraordinarily useful in my dealings at a national level. I work at Warkworth Medical Centre six out of 10 sessions now. I did eight or nine before, but while I’m chair of the NZMA I need more time. There’s at least twice as much to do as chair and the media exposure is astronomical. But I knew it was like that and one of the things I’d done as a teenager for pocket money was teach speech and drama, so I have no problem with public speaking.
Locally, as Warkworth grows, there needs to be more doctors and there will eventually be a need for an accident and emergency (A&E) clinic, but at present we are a long way from needing it just in terms of numbers. In all of Auckland there are only four overnight clinics because they don’t make financial sense. People would like to have emergency care at their back door, but are not prepared to pay the real cost for it and so it cannot run as a business. It has to be subsidised and it has to be rationalised. People need to understand that the medical centre at Wellsford is a contracted community service for North Rodney, so it’s not just for Wellsford; the overnight service for Warkworth is Wellsford. Silverdale doesn’t have one, and that’s grown hugely. Shorecare at Smales Farm is our closest 24-hour clinic, one of only two subsidised overnight services on the North Shore (the other is in Glenfield).
I knew from about the age of 12 that I wanted to do medicine and wanted to be a GP. I’ve no idea why, it was just what I wanted to do. There was no one in my family in medicine at all, ever. I was born in Auckland but grew up and went to school in Hamilton. I have – I had – two brothers, one older, one younger, but my younger brother was killed on a motorbike when I was 21. It was incredibly distressing. He left a pregnant fiancée, and it happened just before they were due to get married – we came home from the funeral to the wedding invitations. My sister-in-law then went through a marriage ceremony by proxy with my older brother, so she could be a widow and their daughter could take his name. My parents divorced when I was 15, my father remarried and dropped dead of a heart attack when I was 23, then my grandfather, who I was very close to, died three years later, so I’m not unfamiliar with family death.
At 17, I took a year off and worked in a medical lab in Hamilton, which gave me a very good understanding of the value, and limitations, of blood tests. I did my first three years at the University of Otago in Dunedin and the second three years in Wellington. When Robin and I met and married, he was at university before going to teachers training college and I was a third year medical student – I was 20 and he was 21. We took out a $1000 loan from the Medical Assurance Society, which we didn’t have to pay interest on until I was qualified, so we could afford to have a full sit down, three-course meal and reception.
Because I’d done really well on my course, I was being offered specialist training places, but turned them down because I wanted to be a GP. And they said, ‘Why would you do that when you could be a specialist?’, which infuriated me then and infuriates me even more now. So I did a lot of general medicine, A&E, and general psychology, all the things that would be useful for general practice. We moved to Auckland for my second hospital year, when my husband was out on his teaching year and I did a postgraduate diploma in obstetrics and gynaecology, A&E, and ENT (ear, nose and throat).
Then we went overseas for four-and-a-half years and I completed my postgraduate studies in the UK where I worked at a GP surgery in the Forest of Dean, in Gloucestershire. I completed my training, then stayed there for another couple of years. I was offered a partnership in that practice and was also offered a partnership in Australia. We couldn’t decide what to do, so we came back to New Zealand for a visit and decided this was where we wanted to be. In late January 1988 I did a locum in Auckland and at Family Planning, then in May we moved to Warkworth. We had been tossing up between Wanaka and Warkworth, because we really enjoy skiing but also enjoy sailing. We had family from Kaitaia to Lumsden in Southland, so it didn’t matter in that regard. We drove the length of New Zealand trying to decide.
My first locum job was with a man who was good friends with John Andrew (a local doctor) and he said I should come here, as ‘it was about time they had a woman doctor up here’. A couple of weeks later he said, ‘You haven’t been up there yet, why not?’ So, Robin and I came up and had a meal with doctors John Andrew, David Cross and Warwick Palmer, and I joined the practice. We established a full-time practice at Snells Beach and we’ve been here ever since. Robin and I had our first daughter in 1990 and I took my entire annual leave of six weeks instead of maternity leave, then came straight back to work full time. Robin used to bring her in for her morning feed during surgery while I was working. We have three daughters – Hannah, Stephanie and Caroline. I did the same for all of them; went back to work after six weeks and breastfed them all until they were nine months. They all went to Warkworth Primary and Mahurangi College, and all swam competitively, Hannah for NZ from when she was 15, and Caroline won a swimming scholarship to Auburn University in Alabama. Hannah has rowed for Oxford, including in the boat race against Cambridge in 2014, which they won. She’s in the final year of a PhD there in experimental biochemistry. Stephanie is doing postgraduate medicine at the Australian National University in Canberra and Caroline is completing a Bachelors in Marine Biology at Auburn.
When the girls were at school, I coached gymnastics and hockey, and my husband coached hockey and swimming. He was involved with the Kowhai Swimming Club for nearly 16 years. I started to become involved in medical governance in 1999 when Caroline was about 5. It was the beginning of the Independent Practitioner Association movement and I wanted to ensure our rural voice was being heard, so I stood as a director of Comprehensive Health Services and was voted in and it’s gone on from there. It’s a busy life, but you couldn’t do any of it unless you’ve got that person with you who is willing to support you and enable you.
