For the next six months you will find defence force doctor Patrick Owens at Lithgow Hospital as he works between the emergency department, general practise and on the wards with Lithgow's Professor John Dearin.
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Dr Owens is a rural and remote medicine registrar who has been sent to Lithgow to get the skills needed before he heads out to sea later this year.
"I'm one of the medical officers that works on ships and looks after the crew when we go out to sea," he said.
"The navy wants me to do some emergency time, some inpatient time, they want me to do some time in GP because as you can imagine the needs on a ship are very niche."
Dr Owens said that getting as much practice as he could would be most beneficial.
"You can't refer to anyone [on a ship] and you don't have any tests so you need to be able to look after everything yourself, so the Navy just wanted me to get some practice," he said.
Before medicine, Dr Owens studied Science and Immunology as well as Parasitology.
"I always wanted to do a bit of everything, try my hand at managing any problem, any time," he said.
Having trained previously on the Gold Coast, Dr Owens said Lithgow gave him more of a chance to manage everything himself.
"Professor Dearin has been very accommodating in getting me out here and letting me do a bit of everything which is different to big city hospitals," he said.
"If big city hospitals have someone with a cardiac problem they have to go to cardiology, but here you can manage it all yourself."
Learning that skill will be vital for when Dr Owens takes to the ocean.
"It's interesting and it makes the medicine a lot more fun because you don't fall back onto testing or other specialists, you do it all yourself," he said.
"It makes your clinical skills a whole lot better because you have to look after it yourself, if you want to find out if someone has appendicitis you can't just take the blood test and see what their white cell count is doing, you have to diagnose it clinically based on what you find on examining them.
"Then it's got the added excitement of if you do want to get someone off the ship you put them on a helicopter, fly them to the nearest base, it's a bit of fun."
Dr Owens said that being a doctor on a Navy ship, you tend to be dealing with quite a healthy population of people.
"They are fit, young and predominantly men who have all been screened for any health problems so what you see, tends to be stuff that has made them acutely unwell, and you don't see as much chronic disease," he said.
"So it is more broken bones from falling, or cuts, bruises, scratches, that type of thing."
One side of medicine that Dr Owens has to train regularly for is mass casualty events.
"In the event of bombs going off or the ship getting shot up, which, touch wood, hasn't happened, but you train for it constantly," he said.
"It really is a side of medicine you don't get to do elsewhere."
Dr Owens could be away on duty for anywhere between three to nine months at a time, for trips to the Middle East.
"So a doctor could be gone by himself for six months to look after the crew, which is a huge responsibility," he said.
"You have 100 per cent care for however many sailors and officers you have on board for six months and it is daunting but I'm looking forward to doing it."
When Dr Owens time in the Navy comes to an end, he would like to head up North to use his undergraduate degree of immunology and parasitology.
"There is still a big problem with infectious diseases in the Indigenous community, and a big problem with infectious diseases up north in Cairns, Darwin, in the Torres Strait and coming down from the PNG, so I would love to get up there and do some properly remote stuff in the islands," he said.
"Or somewhere, where there is a long way to a hospital, and you've got people who have interesting infections.
"I would love that, but that is down the line once I'm out of the Navy. One day."
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