When Melbourne’s Dr Abhishek Verma first found out he was getting an OAM, he didn’t believe it.
“I thought this has got to be some sort of scam – like, I haven’t done anything extraordinary or special,” he laughs.
“It was not anything that was on my radar in a million years.”
Growing up in a household full of medical professionals, including Dr Amit Verma, consultant dermatologist at The Alfred Hospital, and Dr Ajai Verma, Chief Medical Officer at Barwon Health, Dr Abhishek Verma OAM feels like the ‘least accomplished’ member of his family.
But as the youngest Chair of the Victorian Medical Board, and a GP of the Year winner in 2022, Dr Abhishek Verma OAM has achieved career successes most of us can only dream of.
“My parents instilled the value of having a job where you are doing something with impact and tangibly improving people’s lives, not just doing a job for a pay check or recognition. I guess that was the reason we were all encouraged to consider medicine as a career,” he says of their family passion for medicine.
Dr Verma fell in love with general practice in Year 10, when work experience at his family practice ‘exceeded his expectations’.
“I was sitting in on our family GP, just watching him do his job and [loved] the variety of stuff,” he recalls. “You got this sense that this doctor knew everything. Now it’s not possible to know everything about medicine, but he just had a breadth of knowledge and could contribute something to every consultation.”
“I thought, wow, that’s pretty extraordinary.”
After medical school, he did a brief stint as an ENT surgeon but found his way back to General Practice when his child was born so he could ‘be around a bit more’.
Coming from this surgery background, Dr Verma still enjoys the more hands-on parts of being a GP, such as skin procedures. But his favourite part of the job is the chance to offer longitudinal care, and to witness the impact of that care.
“General practice can be whatever you want. It can be a transactional thing where you go in, needing a script or a medical certificate and that’s it,” he explains.
“But the kind of GP that I want to be is your partner in health, to help you manage whatever it is that you need to manage.”
In a system that prioritises expedience, Dr Verma believes in taking the time to listen and learn from his patients.
“As a GP, you get this unique window into people’s lives and you don’t just see the illness, but you also see other stuff, which is amazing,” he says.
“From any clinical consultation, I get just as much out of it as my patients. I’m very lucky in that way.”
As the lynchpin of primary care, general practitioners are crucial for managing quality of life – so Dr Verma’s time and care towards his patients has garnered their exceptional trust.
“I’ve had patients who’ll wait four hours in my waiting room just for a script because they want to see me. They won’t see anyone else – it’s really humbling that they trust you with any healthcare issues,” he reveals.
“I’ll have some patients see a specialist, come back and they won’t have done anything the specialist says because they want to check that you’re okay with it, which is crazy because they just value you [so much]. I think to get that level of trust, you have to spend the time and invest.”
Equally, Dr Verma feels strongly about using his talents to help marginalised communities in Melbourne’s outer-eastern suburbs access medical care, inspired by his grandfather’s selflessness.
“My grandfather was a maxillofacial surgeon; once, on holiday there was a disadvantaged patient who had a bad cleft lip palate, a physical deformity which in particular countries can be really debilitating socially,” he recalls.
“He left the holidays with the family to go and work on this young person for free. Using your training to add something in an altruistic way – I thought that’s amazing.”
Dr Verma juggles practice alongside his roles as an examiner for the RACGP, and as the chair of the Victorian Medical Board.
With only 17 percent of new medical graduates considering general practice, he hopes to use these roles to advocate for the next generation of practitioners.
Dr Abhishek Verma OAM
“We need to give medical students more exposure to general in medical school. If we did, you’d have a lot more uptake because people would see this is actually what you thought being a doctor would be like, seeing a patient from scratch, figuring out their problems, coming up with a plan,” he says.
Despite workforce shortages and persistent Medicare challenges, Dr Abhishek Verma OAM says it’s his desire to help his patients that keeps him going.
“It sounds awfully hubristic, but when people say, ‘you’re the best doctor I’ve ever met’, I just tell them I’m the doctor with the best patients because I learn something from all my patients,” he says. “I learn from the way they manage their health, the way they manage their relationships. I see their courage, I see their resilience, I see their hope, I see their dreams, and I learn something.”
“It’s the patients that sustain me. I really feel that I’m blessed to work in a profession where you can make a difference.”
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