Wes and Marian Fabb: That elusive 'retirement'

May 5, 2001 was a red-letter day for Marian and Wes Fabb. That day they handed over the Wonca laptop with its hundreds of files to the new CEO, Alfred Loh, and the next Administrative Manager of Wonca, Yvonne Chung. This symbolic act occurred at Itala game reserve in South Africa at the beginning of the Executive meeting just prior to the Durban World Conference. After 20 years at the helm of the Wonca Secretariat, retirement beckoned.

It evoked for them strong, mixed feelings - relief at having no longer to maintain an increasingly busy Secretariat, yet sadness at departing from an organization they'd lived with and nurtured for so long.

But a funny thing happened on the way to retirement. In pursuit of its key objectives Develop family practice training and services in areas of greatest need, in the spirit of equity and Facilitate education in general practice/family medicine, Wonca Executive decided to expand its website, and at that same meeting awarded a contract to medi+World International, a Melbourne multimedia firm, to develop the website into an educational resource. So it was not long before Wes and Marian, who live in Melbourne, were enlisted to assist. Wes was appointed Webmaster and Marian as his assistant.

They were soon spending countless hours contributing to the design of the new website - Global Family Doctor - which was launched on November 5, 2001 at the Wonca Secretariat in Singapore. It was soon known as GFD.

Marian and Wes at their seaside home at Inverloch, on the south coast of mainland Australia

At first it was thought that quality education was the way to attract visitors, and GFD had an abundance of it from medi+World sources. But statistics from other websites indicated that education alone would not attract sufficient visitors to interest sponsors - and sponsorship was seen as essential to keep the website viable.

So a unique idea emerged. Everyone knew how difficult, indeed impossible its was for busy clinicians to keep up with the medical literature. Family doctors felt they were lagging behind their specialist colleagues. What if GFD could help them to keep up? Wes began scanning the journals for articles of relevance and interest to family doctors, then summarized and posted them on GFD. The visits to the site began to increase. As the number of items posted went up, so did the visits. Then the idea surfaced that emails sent to doctors alerting them to the new items posted each day on GFD would attract more attention to the site. So starting with 150 selected family doctors, emailed alerts began in late 2002, and visits jumped again. Eighteen months later, over 3,300 doctors worldwide receive Journal Alerts, and they attract an average of 1,400 visits to the site every day they're posted. Website pages visited average 6,000 per day, and hits about 10,000 daily.

The Alerts service has been widely applauded. All the feedback is positive and encouraging. It does for busy family doctors what they cannot do for themselves - keep up with the journals.

Wes now scans over 100 online family medicine, general and specialist journals and news services. Out of the thousands of articles they contain, he has consistently found, to his great surprise, that only about 25 articles per week are relevant and of interest to family doctors. These are posted each week - six are clinical reviews on topics important to family doctors, and the rest are cutting edge clinical, epidemiological or health services research. Wes says; "The realization that it is possible to keep up with the medical literature, after believing all these years that it was impossible, is one of the most exciting discoveries of my professional life. That burdensome myth has at last been exploded."

So what's the future of GFD? Wes insists that until substantial sponsorship is obtained, GFD is in jeopardy. "It's too big a job for us to do alone - yet until there's sufficient sponsorship, it will not be possible to engage any help. Without help, GFD is vulnerable because it's dependent on too few. We've agreed to keep it going until Orlando, but then new arrangements will need to be made. To secure GFD and ensure its continuity, a team is needed to sustain it day by day."

"It would be a pity if GFD, providing as it does a journal update service like no other, were to disappear through lack of financial support. With its consistently high visit rate, GFD represents a rich opportunity for a sponsor who wishes to support a unique and valuable educational service for family doctors world wide, and at the same time achieve a high level of exposure to these doctors."

"We live in hope" he says, "and in the meantime get great personal satisfaction providing this service, and in doing so retaining contact with our beloved Wonca."

Retirement for Marian and Wes has been elusive, but their heartfelt hope is that they will soon be able to hand over a fully functioning high quality GFD to a well funded team that will keep it alive and growing". Then the contentment of real retirement would be theirs.