Dr Frank Cullen, a lifetime of listening

This afternoon (Friday 28 November) when the doors at Fairfield Medical Centre close for the weekend, it’ll mark the end of an era. Not a building, not a service line, but a relationship that has stretched across decades and generations.

After more than forty years in general practice, former Pinnacle board chair and long-serving GP, Dr Frank Cullen, is retiring.

Dr Frank struggles to put the moment into words.

He is, he admits, looking forward to retirement, particularly evenings without paperwork and weekends that do not start and end at his desk. But alongside the relief sits a quiet ache.

“I’m certainly looking forward to retirement,” he says, “but I’m also recognising that there are a whole lot of special relationships that will be ending - with colleagues as well as with patients and the community. All those very long-term, multi-generational relationships.”

Frank Cullen grew up in Maungaturoto, a small Northland farming community. He was 14 when he found himself alone at home with his older brother, who was working on the farm and, dangerously, allergic to bee stings.

“One day he got a bee sting down the back of the farm. He managed to stagger home and I was the only one there. I kind of had to deal with it and get help,” Dr Frank remembers.

“I’m not sure if it was the sheer terror of the situation, or the fact I never wanted to be in that position again of not knowing what to do, but that was the turning point.”

The boy who never wanted to feel that helpless again became the man who would spend his life making sure others did not feel alone in their own scary medical moments.

Medical school opened many doors. Frank enjoyed each hospital run as a house surgeon and could see himself doing a number of specialties. But something kept drawing him back to the kind of doctor he had known growing up.

“It was the contact with our local doctors in the area,” he says. “In hospital you’re dealing with people, but just a specific small part of the person. General practice is the less specialised, more generalised, day-to-day lived experience. It’s the person as a whole rather than what their problem is. For me, the medicine is interesting, but the people are far more interesting.”

After some locum work in Hamilton, Dr Frank joined Fairfield Medical Centre in 1983 and never left. Fairfield, and the community around it, became the anchor for his entire clinical career.

One recent moment brought the span of that work sharply into focus. Sitting in his consulting room, doing a routine six-week check for a new baby, he realised he had seen the baby’s great-grandmother the day before.

“That kind of intergenerational journey has been one of the highlights for me,” he says. “Watching kids be born, kids growing up, moving on, starting their own families.”

Dr Frank is honest about the toll general practice can take.

“Challenges… for me personally it was getting burnt out and cynical,” he says. “I saw that in a lot of colleagues who were a bit older, who reached a point where general practice became almost negative.”

Part of the problem, in his view, is a fundamental lack of understanding of what general practice actually is.

“The patients recognise and value it,” he says. “But nobody outside general practice really understands because they’re only thinking about the medicine. For me, general practice is not only about the medicine. It’s about the person, their place in the community, their place in the family. That’s what makes general practice special, and why long-term relationships with a doctor are so important.”

What stopped him sliding into cynicism himself was stepping slightly outside his consulting room and into Pinnacle.

“Becoming involved in Pinnacle really showed me that the problem was not ‘them’, it was ‘me’,” he says. “Being outside of general practice looking in, being surrounded by people who found primary care so exciting and interesting, made me change my perspective and it’s kept my interest going. I doubt whether I’d still be in general practice now if it hadn’t been for that, because I would have been burnt out and bitter and negative and cynical – all the soul-destroying things that I see happening to GPs.”

Dr Frank went on to chair the Pinnacle board at a time when, as he describes it, the organisation was often underestimated.

“In the early days I think people regarded us as that little rural PHO in the middle of the North Island,” he says. “We weren’t in Auckland, we weren’t in Wellington, we weren’t of much importance.”

Yet while the spotlight shone elsewhere, Pinnacle teams quietly built systems that would later shape care well beyond the Midlands region.

“If you go back and look at the systems that are now adopted in the Waikato and variations of them around the country, they were all developed in Pinnacle,” he says. “All that innovation and early change into health record stuff, the electronic referrals, all that came out of Pinnacle. There was a huge amount, and we kind of just flew under the radar.”

Over time, changing environments, tighter constraints and shifts in central and DHB support made that sort of innovation harder. He is realistic about that, but still quietly proud of what was achieved with relatively little noise and a lot of determination.

Pinnacle’s largest meeting room now carries his name. True to form, Dr Frank would rather talk about the work than the sign on the door, but the naming reflects how deeply his leadership and calm, steady advocacy have been felt across the network.

Asked about the future of general practice, Dr Frank is candid.

“I’m a bit worried that a lot of doctors isolate themselves in general practice,” he says. “Everybody pays lip service, but for all the time I’ve been in general practice there’s never been any true recognition of the value and the benefit that general practice brings to the community.”

He does, however, believe the core model will endure.

“I think general practice will survive and keep going because there isn’t a viable alternative,” he says. “People at times will embrace other things like telemedicine and new tools because everyone is busy and it fits busy lifestyles, but if you allow that to take over standard general practice then general health will just get worse. People need connection, and you don’t get that through a computer screen.”

Underneath the analysis is a simple belief that has guided him from that first terrifying bee sting: being there, in person, matters.

He’s not expecting retirement to be quiet, exactly – just different.

“I’m looking forward to not spending nights and some of each weekend doing paperwork,” he admits.

Dr Frank is quick to acknowledge the people who have made his long career possible.

“I have a wife who has been there every step of the way,” he says. “When I look back, it’s really the family who has supported me in this role and paid the price of my being in these roles.”

He and his wife have four sons and four grandchildren. All four boys now live overseas – three in Australia and one in London – which gives retirement an extra appeal.

“Having the ability to more spontaneously visit is going to be a real benefit of being retired,” he says.

Closer to home, his garden is calling.

“I’m a very keen gardener and as I look out the window there’s an awful lot to do out there. Having the time to do that is going to be very good.”

If there is any doubt about how he feels about a life in general practice, it disappears when he talks about the first proper holiday he took after 25 to 30 years in Fairfield.

He and his wife went overseas for five weeks. Before he left, a small worry kept surfacing: what if he came back and found he no longer wanted to be there?

“I came back and that first morning in the surgery was such a massive buzz,” he says. “I knew I didn’t have to worry.”

“To sum up my life in general practice – I’ve loved it. I think I’ve had the luckiest and best career that I could have had really.”

As for how he hopes patients and colleagues will remember him, his answer, predictably, is understated.

“I think when patients and colleagues remember me, I’d like it to be that I listened,” he says. “Some of the lovely comments that I have had from patients, that’s one of the things that keeps coming up – about giving them time.”

For a shy, humble GP from Maungaturoto who never wanted the spotlight, that might be the most fitting legacy of all: thousands of people who can say, hand on heart, “My doctor – Dr Frank Cullen – listened.”