A new appointment
Dr Kenneth Cutbush has been appointed Visiting Medical Officer at Cairns Base Hospital. He will visit several times a year to treat public patients with shoulder conditions.
What a Visiting Medical Officer is
A Visiting Medical Officer is a specialist in private practice who is appointed to a public hospital to provide services there on a sessional basis, rather than being employed by the hospital full time. A large share of the specialist work in Australian public hospitals is delivered this way. For a regional hospital it is often the only workable arrangement, because the volume of any one subspecialty may not justify a permanent appointment while the need for that subspecialty is nonetheless real.
Why this matters for access
Specialist shoulder surgery has historically been concentrated in the capital cities, which has meant patients in far north Queensland travelling to Brisbane for treatment, or waiting. A visiting appointment means those patients can be treated locally, in the public system, and the registrars based there gain training in the process.
What a visiting shoulder service covers
A visiting subspecialty service generally runs a clinic alongside an operating list, so that patients can be assessed, listed and operated on within the same cycle of visits rather than across several of them. The conditions seen are the usual range of the subspecialty: rotator cuff tears, arthritis severe enough to warrant joint replacement, recurrent instability, stiff and painful shoulders, and the consequences of fractures around the shoulder. Individual results vary, and each patient is assessed on examination and imaging before any operation is considered.
Operating at a distance from one's usual hospital carries its own requirements. The implants and instrumentation have to be on site, the theatre team has to be familiar with the particular operations, and the follow up and rehabilitation have to be arranged locally with the physiotherapists who will actually see the patient. Those arrangements are a large part of what makes a visiting service genuinely useful rather than an occasional event.
Related information
See our other Cairns posts, including operating at Cairns Base Hospital and shoulder replacement surgery in Cairns, and our rehabilitation, physiotherapy and accommodation pages.