Webinar: pain management for rare disorders

Last week Dr Buzz Burrell hosted a webinar focusing on managing pain for a person's own chronic health condition or on behalf of someone they support. Dr Burrell is the owner of Renwich Medical Centre in Blenheim and had a daughter with a rare disorder. 

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Dr Buzz Burrell

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He is originally from Lancashire, North West England and studied medicine in London graduating in 1986, and then joined the physician training program. He spent an elective in rural Bangladesh where he met his wife Lauren and had three beautiful girls, one of which had a rare disorder so he has deep awareness of both the challenges and gifts of this experience.

Post membership, he was a respiratory research lecturer and fellow in Dunedin, however, the excitement of rural and remote medicine took him to Reefton on the West Coast two years later, where he was a Rural Hospital Doctor and GP. He established remote clinic and emergency services for the second largest remote area of NZ. Buzz has also experienced remote rural practice in the Chatham Islands, and spent four years in a remote rural practice in the Pilbara of Western Australia, returning to New Zealand in 2006. 

Unexpected achievements include - Lecturer of the year 1993; runner up New Zealander of the year in 1997. 

He is on the NZMA board, and its GP Council, Chairs the Rural Chapter of the RNZCGP, is on the MOH Medicines Classification Committee, and was on the Ministry of Health medicinal cannabis advisory committee. Buzz is a Royal NZ College GP registrar trainer and senior lecturer within the University of Otago Medical School Rural Medical Immersion Programme. He's a Senior Lecturer for the Otago University and works in Chronic Pain service in Nelson.