Respiratory physician specialist Peter Kendall honoured for dedication at WA Rural Health Long Service Awards

A respiratory physician specialist who has travelled thousands of kilometres to deliver critical care to regional patients for more than two decades has been honoured for his dedication and service. Clinical Associate Professor Peter Kendall was the only specialist to be recognised at the annual WA Rural Health Long Service Awards on February 13 for about 25 years of regional service. The ceremony at Perth Zoo celebrated 38 WA medical practitioners who have worked for 20, 30, 40 and 50 years in rural medicine. Dr Kendall has worked in medicine for 51 years, training in intensive care before specialising in respiratory medicine, specifically treating lung diseases. He said that while working at Fremantle Hospital, he was encouraged to establish connections with regional hospitals that fed into Fremantle. One of those was Narrogin, which marked the beginning of his decades of rural health dedication. In the late 1990s, Dr Kendall started his Narrogin clinic from Narrogin Health Service which he would travel to every three months. “Prior to that I was going to Bunbury and Busselton, so I’ve had an outreach capacity from very early days because I thought it was really important,” Dr Kendall said. “The patients and general practitioners appreciate me going to this site, so that’s certainly enough encouragement.” Since then, Dr Kendall has opened clinics at Katanning Health Service and Denmark Health Service to cover the Great Southern district, visiting all three clinics four times a year. He has been based in Albany for the past 11 years and continues the journey to the regional hospitals despite being semi-retired. Dr Kendall said his parents and extended family had grown up in regional NSW, where he would spend a lot of his holidays. He said this inspired him to return to study in Newcastle, NSW, because they had such a great reputation for training rural doctors. “It was a bit of ‘you can’t take the bush out of the kid’ stories,” he said. “I had this yearning to initially be a country GP, and I went to England and did anaesthetics for a year with the idea of being a GP. “I already had it in the back of my mind to be able to get out into the country area.” Dr Kendall encouraged other medical professionals to go beyond their comfort zone to further their personal development and said it was critical that rural patients had access to the same model of care as metro residents.