Month: April 2025

May is just around the corner. Please recall that “Doctor’s Day in May” is a concept whereby we ask doctors to consider giving a day’s pay (or part thereof) just once a year to support medical training in developing world countries. That is like giving 1/2 of 1% of your salary once a year. This money goes a very long way in countries where medical services are far less expensive than in Australia.

It is a good time to reflect upon our great good fortune to be working as doctors in Australia rather than in many other countries in the world.  In some countries just going to work can be a life-risking exercise as illustrated in  this headline from the New York Times just 1 week ago.

“Sudanese paramilitaries killed the entire staff (9 people) of the last medical clinic in a famine-stricken camp in the western region of Darfur”.

In  quite a few countries the remuneration for being a doctor is certainly nothing special. For example in Cuba, medical salaries doubled about a year ago. They are now about $US 16,000 per annum.

Also thankfully, unlike in the USA, we generally do not have the endless red tape surrounding the procurement of certain tests and treatments in order to treat our patients appropriately. Imagine the frustration and hassle!

Please consider your donation to Twice the Doctor while reflecting on this good fortune in practising our chosen profession in this country.

It seems that the world is becoming a more and more dangerous, unstable and unpredictable place. This has been fairly terrible for the world economy and of course seems primarily due to the policies of Trump and his enforces. Whoever is to blame, the people that tend to suffer most in a major downturn are the poor…. worldwide.

They have no significant reserves to cope. Add to this the major de-funding of USAID (U.S. agency for international development) and ever falling foreign aid by U.S. and in fact most countries including Australia and you have an increasingly dire situation for the less fortunate on our planet.

Apparently, on average, Australians think we invest 16% of the Federal budget on overseas aid and believe that we should be spending about 12%. 

Actually, Australia spends about 0.21% of our gross national income on overseas aid. That’s 21cents in every $100.

We live in a lucky country. In 2023 Health care spending per capita in Australia was about $8,000 – the vast majority provided by state and federal government. In the Democratic Republic of Congo it was around $21.

It is only a month till May. Please contemplate the above while considering your future contribution to TTD (and our developing world programmes) where we are trying to redress some of this startling imbalance of what is basically …. luck.