Dr Rosie Green UK
23rd February 2024 | Back to News
Dr Rosie Green and some of her adventures around New Zealand.
Doctor Rosie Green has joined Three Rivers on a placement from England where she has almost completed her GP training.
“I was drawn to general practice because I’d enjoyed it in my foundational year. I really liked the generalist aspect of it and seeing patients through longer periods of time. I also like the diagnostic side of it - of being the first port of call for a patient - and unpacking all of their symptoms.”
Doctor Rosie Green has joined Three Rivers on a placement from England where she has almost completed her GP training.
She said it had been one of the best decisions she’d made to come here. “I love Gisborne – we’re living close to the beach and I can walk to work,” she says.
She and her husband have already bought a campervan and toured the South Island with her parents who are visiting from the UK.
They packed a lot into their two week holiday visiting Picton, Franz Josef Glacier, Wanaka, Queenstown, Milford Sound, Tekapo, Christchurch and Kaikoura clocking up around 3000 kilometres.
“The scenery was amazing,” Rosie enthuses.
She completed her medical degree at the University of Manchester in 2017 after five years of study and took a year out to complete another BSc degree in Urgent and Emergency Care from Plymouth University.
From there she did two foundational years at the Royal Bournemouth Hospital in the South West of England where she lives.
Here she covered surgery, cardiology and elderly care in the first year followed by emergency medicine, general practice and intensive care in the second.
She got unwell in her second foundational year and needed to take a year out of training for treatment, but she was able to keep working through this thanks to a supportive team at the hospital and worked in the operating theatres shadowing the anaesthetists.
She thinks being on the receiving end of medical care has made her a better doctor.
Finishing her foundation training just as Covid-19 was hitting the United Kingdom, she continued to work in intensive care where she was restricted to treating the green patients who didn’t have Covid-19 due to her compromised immune system.
“It was a very busy time in the hospital, and I felt a bit guilty being unable to treat patients with Covid when all my colleagues had no choice. We had to extend the department into the operating theatres because there weren’t enough beds in intensive care and there wasn’t enough PPE. It was a unique environment to work in because of the outbreak - stressful and rather chaotic.”
By this time Rosie was weighing up her options in terms of specialising.
Despite the fact she had to learn new systems at Three Rivers and also had to get her head around different drugs availability in New Zealand, Rosie has hit the ground running and is enjoying the busy role - seeing her own patients for 15 minute appointments throughout the day.
She’s having such a positive experience she is even contemplating returning to work in New Zealand in the future if the right opportunity came along.