Practical training talk for GPs, from webinar to waiting room
RVTS4GP's podcast comes from Australia's Remote Vocational Training Scheme and is built from edited webinar excerpts, a Grand Round keynote and recorded conversations with clinicians and medico-legal advisors. Its subjects include cause-of-death certificates, men's health, staying safe with dangerous patients and the health effects of bushfire smoke.
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RVTS4GP's podcast, introduced on air as 'RVTS for GPs', comes from the Remote Vocational Training Scheme, which trains and retains GPs in rural, remote and Aboriginal medical service settings across Australia. It treats general practice as a string of concrete problems. Several episodes draw on the scheme's own teaching archive. Dr Justin Coleman, a Brisbane GP working in Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander health, presents an excerpt from a first-year webinar on men's health and weighs how worried to be about a breast lump in a teenage boy. He is candid about the limits of his numbers and flags a statistic he says he has not looked up. Another episode, put together in response to registrars' questions, joins a 2019 webinar by medical educator Dr Mike Eaton to a 2023 session with medico-legal advisors from MDA National, including Dr Libby Harris. It covers paperwork every GP eventually faces: life extinct and cause-of-death certificates, shared responsibility for nursing home patients, what the person answering the coroner's phone needs to know, and when a palliative care team rather than the GP should provide the certificate. Workplace safety gets a two-part conversation between Meryl and Associate Professor Chris Hogan about distressed and potentially dangerous patients and about how to make practices more secure. His examples are hard to forget. He recalls freezing when a loaded weapon was shoved in his face, and being thrown across a room by a patient high on ice. His advice is plain and physical: let a distressed patient have their say, practise and rehearse your response, and skip the tie that can be grabbed. A flash of gallows humour sits beside his line that bravery isn't the absence of fear, it's the absence of panic. The show also looks at RVTS itself. One conversation discusses five research papers on the scheme published in an October 2024 Medical Journal of Australia supplement and tests the common perception that the program is expensive. The answer offered is that cost per registrar is roughly on par with other rural GP training programs, and that the large workshops lasting several days create the impression. Climate enters through Professor Nicholas Talley's keynote at the 2025 RVTS Grand Round, which focused on rural GPs caring for communities in a changing climate. In his excerpt he names coal mining and bushfires as sources of air pollution, warns that fine particles have no safe level of exposure, and points to thunderstorm asthma events that have already happened in Melbourne. The tone is collegial and clinical, with practitioners talking to other practitioners. Meryl opens episodes with an Acknowledgement of Country, and the closing notes say the podcast is not medical advice. After the safety conversation, the notes also point to the Doctors Health Alliance for support. The result is less commentary than working knowledge that a GP could use in the next day in clinic.
Made for: Suits a GP registrar or working GP, especially one in rural or remote Australian practice, who wants practical, experience-based guidance on certificates, clinical presentations and workplace safety. It also fits a listener curious about how remote GP training is organised and evaluated.
What sets it apart: The podcast is built from a training scheme's own teaching material, not from medical news, so it answers specific questions, such as when a GP can sign a death certificate or how to handle a violent patient. It also examines the scheme through published research on its own record.
Distance education to GP registrars in Australia
A death certificate lands on your desk; seeing the patient around town suddenly isn't enough.
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Short reviews from the PlayNext desk, based on the episodes we processed.
A forceful Grand Round linking bushfire air pollution, broader air pollution and plastics to health pressures facing rural communities.
Professor Nicholas Talley's Grand Round presentation frames climate health as a practical rural clinical issue, linking coal mining pollution, bushfires and thunderstorm asthma with conditions GPs may see more often.
A practical, research-led review of how RVTS supports rural GP training and what the model takes to sustain.
RVTS for GPs gives a practical reading of five recent papers on whether the Remote Vocational Training Scheme can train and keep GPs in rural, remote, and Aboriginal medical service settings, including overseas-trained doctors.
De-escalation advice becomes memorable when it reaches the paper cup and the unstable airway.
Managing a distressed patient can hinge on details that seem almost too ordinary to matter until the room changes. RVTS for GPs' conversation with Dr Chris Hogan moves from letting a patient ventilate distress and offering care to the cues that can make someone feel threatened:…
A grounded review of how fear, rehearsal, false alarms, and debriefs can shape safer responses in general practice.
Workplace safety is treated here as something practices rehearse, not simply hope to manage in the moment. In conversation with Meryl Nicholl, Associate Professor Chris Hogan reflects on a fatal incident in New South Wales general practice and on his own experience of freezing…
A practical guide to deciding who can certify death, and when responsibility belongs elsewhere.
A death certification question becomes a grounded test of professional responsibility as the episode works through the case of 76-year-old Indra Mata, who has died in a local hospital, and the practical issue of who in Australia may issue a life extinct form.
A grounded look at medical error, doctor support, and careful patient communication after a distressing near miss.
Meryl Nicholl presents part one of a Grand Round 2022 discussion that treats errors as a normal, painful part of human work, then anchors that idea in a hypothetical near miss involving a distressed doctor.
Local medicine, told through physicians' lives.
Clinical oncology evidence, translated into treatment decisions.
Professor Nicholas Talley tells RVTS for GPs that about 70 percent of Australians see climate change as important or very important, while 20 to 30 percent do not.
RBTS for GPs discusses the October 2024 Medical Journal of Australia supplement on the Remote Vocational Training Scheme, which published five papers on nearly 25 years of rural, remote, and Aboriginal medical service training.
Meryl Nicholl and Dr Chris Hogan frame GP workplace safety as a survival issue after a New South Wales case where a patient produced a firearm in general practice.
RVTS for GPs continues Meryl Nicholl’s conversation with Dr Chris Hogan about managing distressed and potentially dangerous patients in general practice.
RVTS for GPs uses Meryl Nicol's registrar questions to unpack life-extinct and cause-of-death certificates in Australia.
Meryl Nicholl hosts a panel with Dr George Chekis, Dr Ruanne Brell, and Dr Amita Patel about clinical errors, near-misses, and physician distress.
RVTS4GP's podcast examines medical near-misses through George Chekis's Swiss cheese model, where failures by a nurse, doctor, and radiology service can align into an incident.
Trish Evans demonstrates short arm slabs, thumb spicas, and short leg back slabs for wrist, thumb, ankle, and foot injuries in an RVTS for GPs workshop.
A special edition of RVTS for GPs featuring a grand round case discussion on a 16-year-old with facial swelling, joint pain, and rash, with expert commentary.
A medical education podcast for GP registrars featuring a case discussion about a patient with acute confusion.