Australia Day Honours 2024: Community at the heart of Dr Virginia Longley’s five-decade career in health

Denmark GP Dr Virginia Longley believes her inclusion on the Australia Day honours list reflects her willingness to contribute to communities in the best way she knows how.

Dr Longley, who has been a GP in Denmark for more than two decades, is included on the list as the recipient of a Medal of the Order of Australia.

Just like so many other recipients of the medal before her, the 75-year-old was surprised when she was informed the honour would be coming her way.

“First I got a phone call and then I got a letter and thought to myself, are they having me on?” she said.

“It seemed to be real so I answered their questions.

“It’s a huge honour, obviously as doctors we do what we can to serve our communities and to be recognised for that is a great honour.”

The importance of community resonates throughout Dr Longley’s memories of her more than 50-year career as a doctor.

Whether reflecting on her time at Sir Charles Gairdner Hospital or as a GP at the Aboriginal Medical Service in East Perth, Spearwood, Walpole or Denmark, it is the relationships she has built that stand out.

“I’m not a great one for going and playing bowls or doing this or doing that,” Dr Longley said.

“I’m quite content within myself, but I like to be part of the community giving using the skills I have.”

She has always been one to go the extra mile for the patients within her communities.

Sometimes that would mean treating someone who has knocked on the front door of her home.

I’m quite content within myself, but I like to be part of the community giving using the skills I have.

Plenty of other times it has meant taking time with a patient instead of keeping them to just 10 minutes.

One time it involved completing a goat castration that had gone wrong.

“In the Croatian community, my one big memory is somebody knocking on my door saying ‘doctor, doctor, you have to come something is really badly wrong’,” Dr Longley said.

“This young Croatian man had tried to castrate his goat with a piece of string and failed — it was in agony and I got really cross, but I put the goat on the kitchen table and finished it for them, then sowed him up, then he stomped off going ‘hmmph’.

“Anyway, about six weeks later, they invited me to a barbecue and said goat was on the menu — it was just part of what happened.”

Dr Longley moved south to Denmark in 2003 when she accepted roles as a GP in nearby Walpole, which she was headhunted for by Silver Chain.

She spent 10 years working half the week in Walpole and the other half in Denmark before her semi-retirement in 2013.

“I had a very wonderful time in Walpole,” she said.

“I loved the people of Walpole and it is a really lovely little community.”

Since then, she has continued to work at Denmark Family Practice and as an emergency doctor at Denmark Health Service.

More recently she has managed to overcome a “stumbling block and another little mountain to climb” after waking up paralysed from a back fusion in May.

She said she was getting closer to walking without aid again and that she had been determined to return to part-time work at the practice.

“I said to myself ‘well, you were in full flight’ and I wasn’t ready to give up and I’m still not ready to give it up,” she said.

“I thought for my mental health, I will go back.

“And I’ve gone back and I work two half-days a week, just while I’m still in rehab.”

I said to myself ‘well, you were in full flight and i wasn’t ready to give up’ and I’m still not ready to give it up

She also has ambitions of returning to help in the emergency department but is “not quite ready”.

She is also keen to get back in the saddle of her other life passion — equestrian and horseriding.

She has been involved in dressage since the mid-1970s, first as a competitor, then as a judge and now as a para-equestrian classifier.

She described it as her way of staying sane because dressage required “a complete function of focus on what you’re doing, but it’s not medicine”.

“I now use my skill as a doctor to assess the disabled athletes as to what grade they are going to compete in, which is very exciting and very interesting,” she said.

“A lot of them are worse off than I am and I’m going to get back on my horse, I will. But not just yet because I haven’t quite got the balance.

“You see them (athletes with a disability) on their horse and they’ve got the big smile on their face and the horse is looking after them, and they are so happy living their life.”