When Georgina van de Water dropped out of school without sitting her high school exams to work in the mailroom of a bank, her disapproving principal warned her she was making a big mistake.
“He told me I’d never go anywhere and would struggle to ever get another job,” she remembers. “Thankfully that hasn’t been my experience.”
Which is putting it mildly.
That head teacher would certainly have been surprised – and shocked – to learn that his wayward pupil now leads the organization responsible for training 90 percent of Australia’s family doctors, and has become one of the country’s most respected healthcare chief executives.
And her leadership of the Royal Australian College of General Practitioners (RACGP), which began in March 2024, couldn’t have come at a more critical time.
The country will have a shortage of 10,600 general practitioners by 2031 as the profession struggles to keep pace with a growing population and a 58 percent surge in demand for its services in the last 15 years.
That was the grim warning from the Australian Medical Association in 2022, and the situation hasn’t improved since, with the number of medical vacancies across the country edging ever upwards.
Opportunities to grow
Van de Water is under no illusions as to the size of the challenge she’s taken on. “The RACGP wasn’t delivering training at anything approaching a big enough scale,” she tells The CEO Magazine. “It needed to grow from 450 staff to over 1,300 practically overnight and needed to build the expertise to do so.
“So the opportunities are immense. We’ve got a wealth of skills, enormous goodwill and genuine commitment from our teams so it’s really about bringing together all those aspects to increase our capacity.”
“The RACGP wasn’t delivering training at anything approaching a big enough scale. It needed to grow from 450 staff to over 1300 overnight and needed to build the expertise to do so.”
The RACGP has set the standards for education, training and best practice for general practitioners (GPs) for more than 60 years, helping them provide a world-class service for the more than three million GP services provided during an average week.
It works closely with the Australian General Practice Accreditation, which delivers general practice accreditations that ensure adherence to quality and safety standards.
Van de Water joined RACGP in 2022 as Chief General Practice Training Officer after six years at GP Synergy, serving as CEO for the final two years.
Her journey from sorting through letters at the bank as a teenager to the stewardship of such a crucial institution gave her a breadth of experience that she calls on every day to cut through bureaucracy, pioneer more efficient processes and juggle the multiple stakeholders who depend on her.
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“In that first job, all I did was receive and deliver mail and then did accounts payable,” she admits. “I moved on to a company that imported tractors and after that joined a debt collection business. Next, I became Operations Manager for a startup that sold coin mechanisms before six months working on Y2K compliance for an accounting software firm.
“I didn’t really like that job because I was only focused on one area of the business and I knew even then that my strength was being able to oversee and influence a variety of departments,” she says.
It may not have been a wholly joyful time, but it proved useful. “Despite everything, I probably learned more there than anywhere else I’ve been because it exposed me to implementing software upgrades and understanding how all the different parts of a business work together,” she says.
“I used the skills and knowledge I picked up there a great deal over the next few years.”
Supporting community doctors
But it was a move to a small, regional training organization called WentWest that proved pivotal.
“It specialized in coaching and educating family doctors from Western Sydney and opened my eyes to the enormously important role that general practice plays in communities, and the support they need for effective primary care to be sustainable,” van de Water says.
“Its commitment to very solid community-focused initiatives was absolutely foundational to how I aim to operate and deliver now.”
“Its commitment to very solid community-focused initiatives was absolutely foundational to how I aim to operate and deliver now.”
It was from there that she moved to GP Synergy as COO in 2016. Four years later, she faced the biggest challenge of her career.
“Two weeks before we went into lockdown for the COVID-19 pandemic, the long-time CEO left and I was thrown in the deep end as interim CEO, which was a very unknown environment for me,” she explains.
“As no one could travel, I didn’t have the luxury of face-to-face meetings to engage properly with those around me so I had to define how I’d build relationships in a non-traditional way.”
Harnessing a wealth of experience
Then the Department of Health dropped the bombshell that it had chosen to return GP training to two colleges meaning GP Synergy had lost a contract it had held for 20 years.
“We had so much valuable experience so I knew that doing nothing to support the future stability of the profession wasn’t an option for us,” she says. “So we negotiated an arrangement with the RACGP and, from early 2022, it became the sole member organization of GP Synergy.”
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To smooth the transition, van de Water joined the college and instigated a national training program supported by management software from JAM Web Services. Two years later, she was appointed CEO.
“I’m very proud that people have faith in me to bring together the training program and that 700 people across the country trust it enough to follow it,” she says.
“That’s astronomical and not something I take for granted. This is the biggest gig of my career and I’m very honored to be leading the college and equipping it to face the challenges ahead.”
