Susanne Bradley talks to Dr Sarah Welch, co-lead of Health New Zealand Te Whatu Ora’s Eye Health National Clinical Network about what motivates her and her views on access to eye health in New Zealand.
Waiting in the busy reception area of the Greenlane Eye Clinic, I feel lucky to catch Dr Sarah Welch between engagements. Walking briskly, she guides me to her shared office, tucked away behind the reception and the nurses’ station. As we get settled, she puts me at ease by sharing how it catches her out every time a junior doctor approaches her with a respectful ‘Dr Welch?’; “Just call me Sarah, I tell them.”
Starting out, medicine was not on the cards for Sarah. Having an interest in both people and science, she did a degree in maths and English at Victoria University of Wellington. After trying a few different jobs, she landed a role as an assistant editor in the film industry. While loving film as a medium, she found the work’s structure challenging. “[In film] you work for six to eight weeks, or maybe a month or two, six days a week, 10 hours a day, so you do nothing but film. Then suddenly, you're an unemployed bum and you don't know what you're going to do next.”
Had she stuck at it, this situation might have improved, she says, but then there was also the lack of artistic freedom to contend with. “It’s very hard to make a living doing alternative, arty films, so I was asking myself if this [working on TV series] was what I really wanted to do.” In the end, people and science won the day and Sarah enrolled to study medicine. Completing her clinical years in Wellington through the University of Otago Medical School in 1997, she also did a one-year research degree in public health. She then moved to Auckland Hospital as a junior doctor and fell in love with ophthalmology while spending a three-month rotation in the specialty. “Working as a house officer in the ophthalmology department back then, we had more autonomy compared with other [district health] boards and eyes are just so cool. The way you can diagnose just by looking at the patient’s eyes, you do the examination, you diagnose and advise a treatment – that's unusual in medicine.”
Patient contact is very valuable to Sarah and she says she still gets a kick out of performing surgery. “It's challenging but it's a time when I’m very focused on the now with nothing else going on. People always talk about that; how good surgery is for your brain calmness. Some surgeries are obviously more challenging than others but having done it for a while now, it's also just kind of fun!”
