Millicent Spencer
Dallas local Dr Saad Fahd is one of the 50 new medical interns starting at Northern Health this week.
Dr Fahd was raised by Syrian migrant parents and attended high school at Gladstone Park Secondary College. He said he is looking forward to starting his career close to home.
“Northern Health has been my local hospital growing up, and it’s helped many of my friends and family over the year with their medical appointments, surgeries, obstetric care and so much more,” he said.
“Between what is now Broadmeadows Hospital and Northern Hospital, many visits were made alongside family members after-school and on days off as the ‘support’ family member.
“It’s through these interactions that my passion for medicine was seeded and I became ever motivated to play a small, but hopefully significant, role in delivering medical care that is compassionate and accessible to the most vulnerable members of our community.”
Dr Fahd said he was looking forward to working with the staff and local community.
“The staff here are absolutely lovely and the patient demographic reflects the demographic I’ve been surrounded with my whole life,” he said.
“I wanted to be a part of the service I have grown familiar with and help the very community that I call home.”
Dr Fahd said navigating the pathway towards a becoming a doctor was challenging with no one in his family working in the medical field.
“Keeping my grades up during my undergraduate studies and achieving a satisfactory score in the graduate medical entrance exam was really difficult,” he said.
“It was particularly challenging given the multiple part-time jobs I held over the years of my study, right up until I graduated last year.”
Northern Health’s medical services director Dr Kean Kuan said she was looking forward to working with the interns in 2023.
“Congratulations to each of them for, not only making it through medical school, but doing so during a once-in-a-lifetime pandemic,” she said.
