The books at Unanderra Family Medical have been closed for about a decade, but this week - as new owners take over - there will be two new GPs taking on new patients.
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And with emergency departments struggling and GPs remaining hard to get into across the region, Dr Varaha Malla and Dr Ramthej Yandra say they will be expanding the services that the Central Road medical centre offers.
"It's been more than a decade since the practice was taking new patients, so we want to serve the community better," Dr Malla said.
For existing patients, he said all the existing staff were remaining on, but there would be extra consulting rooms and more in-house procedures.
Both the new owners trained in India at the same medical school and have more than five years of experience working in rural North Queensland.
They recently moved to the Illawarra to expand their career opportunities.
"My wife is a doctor too, so we wanted to be close to a lot of hospitals - in Wollongong and Sydney as well - but not living in the heart of the CBD, so this was an apt spot for us," Dr Malla said.
He said years of working in North Queensland meant the doctors were experienced in doing a number of complex procedures, especially related to skin cancers, and would be bringing that experience to Wollongong.
"We both have done diplomas in skin cancer in Australia, so we will be doing more skin checks and also excisions, and advanced techniques like flaps and grafts, and we have also done fellowships in diabetics and infectious medicine so that will add to the range of patients we can see," he said.
"We'll also have a range of other smaller procedures like iron transfusions, rather than sending people away.
This will be welcome news for many in the community - and the health system - as last month, NSW Health Minister Ryan Park said a lack of access to general practitioners was driving record-high emergency department attendances and ambulance call-outs in NSW.
"Everyone knows that it is becoming more difficult to access a GP," he said, also saying more people treated the state's emergency department as a first port of call.
With construction work currently adding new rooms to the practice, the new Unanderra GPs are accepting new patients bookings from July 1.
Kate McIlwain
For more than a decade, I've helped the Illawarra Mercury set the news agenda across the region. Currently I'm the paper's health reporter - covering the stories of Illawarra workers and residents in the wake of a global pandemic and at a time where our health systems are stretched to the limit.
For more than a decade, I've helped the Illawarra Mercury set the news agenda across the region. Currently I'm the paper's health reporter - covering the stories of Illawarra workers and residents in the wake of a global pandemic and at a time where our health systems are stretched to the limit.
