LAUSR

His list of achievements and awards is long and glittering: Honorary Fellowship of the Royal College of General Practitioners in recognition of his world leadership in the field of rural health; the Louis Ariotti Award for excellence and innovation in rural and remote health in Australia; Fellow of the World Organization of National Colleges, Academies and Academic Associations of General Practitioners/Family Physicians (WONCA) in recognition of his outstanding service to WONCA and family medicine around the world; the inaugural Small, Rural and Northern Award of Excellence by the Ontario Hospital Association; and the Australian College of Rural and Remote Medicine Life Fellowship Award for outstanding and meritorious service to rural and remote medicine in Australia. In 2011, he was honoured with the Order of Australia (AM) for “service to medicine, through improving the health care of people living in rural and remote communities in developed and developing nations as an educator, researcher, and practitioner”. It perhaps comes as a surprise, given his dedication to rural medicine and training rural clinicians, to find out that Professor Strasser was born and bred in urban Melbourne. Despite that, he knew early in his time as a medical student at Monash University that rural medicine was the direction he wanted to take. “My mother had been a high school teacher in rural settings,” he tells the MJA. “I spent long summer holidays on farms of friends and that’s where my interest in rural communities started.” Today he is the founding Dean of the Northern Ontario School of Medicine (NOSM) in Canada. He started NOSM from the ground up in September 2002 after running Monash University’s School of Rural Health. But it was a circuitous route from Melbourne to Canada. “As was not uncommon in those days, after graduating I headed off to the UK for a couple of years’ training — 6 months in surgery, 12 months in anaesthesia, another 6 months of GP locums.” During a stint in Taunton in Somerset, Prof Strasser met Sarah Robinson, whom he would later marry. Professor Sarah Strasser is now the Head of the Rural Clinical School at the University of Queensland – a long-distance relationship with a difference.