Cardiologist for Narrabri

The long-awaited arrival of a town cardiologist will give Narrabri residents new access to crucial heart health services.

Doctor Roger Chatoor will take the trip from Dubbo once a month to see and treat patients at the Maitland Street Medical Centre.

A medical partnership borne of 14 years of professional friendship seemed like the next logical step for Dr Chatoor and Dr Navin Erathnage, known by members of the community as Dr Navin.

“Dr Navin has always been good to refer patients to me and I have been wanting to provide this outreach service for people who cannot travel,” said Dr Chatoor.

“When people know a cardiologist is willing to come to their town, it helps because access is a real challenge in this region.

“It’s nice to be able to support each other, and having a specialist’s presence in the town helps solidify doctor-patient relationships, so my visits will be better for patient care.”

Dr Chatoor also provides outreach services to other towns every few months and is a passionate about growing decentralised services in regional areas.

“There’s a lot of work but patients experience longer wait times regionally, and with cardiology, early access is important,” said Dr Chatoor.

“Decentralised care is easier to resource than we think, it’s easy to run and offers people a specialist service that’s one less thing they have to travel for.

“One thing we’ve noticed in Dubbo is the more services you provide, the more they are used. People currently have to come to Dubbo to get things done but we can do that here quite easily.

The infrastructure cost of that is not high at all and it’s just having that level of expertise to help build, manage, and provide it.”

Completing his undergraduate studies at the University of West Indies, Dr Chatoor went on to train as a cardiologist at Guy’s and St Thomas’ Hospital in London.

His expertise lies in many aspects of general cardiology; including heart failure, hypertension, cardiac arrhythmias and valvular heart disease, with a special interest in the invasive assessment of coronary artery disease.

After consulting in England for 10 years he arrived in Australia to open the first interventional service in Cairns where he stayed for two years.

When his wife Dr Jacqueline Askwith couldn’t get a job as a paediatrician in the same town, the couple cast their net wider, and the first place they were offered jobs together was in Dubbo.

“My wife looked around and Dubbo offered us both jobs, so we went to Dubbo for a year and stayed for 10,” said Dr Chatoor.

“There is just such a charm to country practice, I didn’t know until I moved to Dubbo and experienced it for myself.

“The really nice thing about country practice is you get to know people, in Dubbo I get to look after brothers and sisters and aunts and uncles, there are some lovely farming families who are just the salt of the earth. They are very close-knit and look after their nans, and I love the relationships over anything else.

“I have patients who come to see me, and we’ll just have a chat, I’ll have little grannies come to see me just to have a day out. On Monday I had the greatest compliment I’ve ever had, a 92-year-old with macular degeneration that I’ve been looking after for eight years, said Dr Chatoor, I just wanted to say I think you’re the most handsome doctor I’ve ever seen.

“I said Beryl go get your injections, then I went and told my wife and she said, ‘She’s probably got macular,’ and I said … yeah that’s right.”

Dr Chatoor is currently one month into his new practice arrangement and already has big plans for the future development of Narrabri’s onsite heart health facilities.

“Narrabri is in a great part of the region, it’s very well set, and we’ve been talking about setting up a diagnostic service here that would supply a large part of the region, then patients could come here instead of going to Tamworth or other places.

“Then we can offer things like halters and stress echo tests and echocardiograms, and that will constitute a lot of stuff that people still have to travel for and that will be enough to provide a service that is a bit more comprehensive than the service we have now.

“Dr Navin is very good at building things, you can tell from the practice, and that’s the sort of outlook you need to develop services. The great thing about cardiology is that it can be set up and run remotely, where you can provide a lot of services offsite.”

Dr Chatoor undertakes a wide range of cardiological procedures which include pacemaker and ICD implantation and interrogation, transthoracic and transoesophageal echocardiography, arrhythmia management, as well as external and internal cardioversion, dedicating a large part of his practice to the invasive management of coronary artery disease.

Dr Chatoor started in Narrabri in June and is pleased with the arrangement so far.

“Dr Navin is very accommodating and the girls are very helpful,” said Dr Chatoor. “The patients are great, all you need to do is feel that the service is valued and that people appreciate the effort you’re making, that’s all.”

Dr Askwith will also be joining Dr Chatoor in offering her paediatrician services a day per month in Narrabri at the end of the year.