Dr Joshua Yee: redefining modern medical practice

“A pessimist sees the difficulty in every opportunity; an optimist sees the opportunity in every difficulty.” – Winston Churchill

After leaving a promising surgical career to pursue balance, purpose, and innovation, Dr Joshua Yee has redefined what it means to be a specialist general practitioner with subspecialty interests. His journey is one of risk, reinvention, and quiet optimism, a story that reflects the new face of Australian primary care.

Counting the cost, and choosing a different path

In 2013, Dr Joshua Yee made a professional decision few would contemplate. After five years of orthopaedic surgical training, he stepped off the specialist surgical trajectory to build a career that more closely aligned with his personal and professional values.

“I’d seen what a life entirely devoted to surgery could cost,” he recalls. “Colleagues who were brilliant at their craft but whose kids didn’t talk to them anymore. I realised that wasn’t the future I wanted.”

Peers warned he was wasting his potential and would rapidly become bored. Instead, the shift ultimately enabled him to use his technical skills while providing ongoing care to patients and developing his own innovations. In short, he forged a distinctive career in Australian medicine on his own terms.

Reclaiming technical purpose

After completing specialist GP training in rural South Australia, Dr Yee returned to metropolitan practice. Though enjoying the breadth of general practice, he missed the technical engagement that surgery once provided.

To maintain those procedural skills, he began surgical assisting in orthopaedic, spinal, neurosurgical, plastic, and reconstructive operations. Yet something was still missing: the ability to guide a patient through the entire course of their treatment.

That opportunity arrived in 2019, when he joined a private spinal surgical practice as a consulting GP subspecialising in spinal medicine. The role allowed him to balance complex procedural work with long-term patient care.

“It offered the intellectual and technical depth of surgery while allowing me to follow patients beyond the operating room,” he explains. “It was the balance I had been searching for.”

Soon after, his procedural interest evolved into an additional focus on skin cancer medicine and minor surgery. He completed a Master of Medicine (Skin Cancer) at the University of Queensland and, in 2024, established his own dedicated skin cancer practice in Adelaide.

Shaped by grit, grounded in family

Dr Yee credits his resilience and adaptability to the lessons of his family. His mother, who survived three open-heart surgeries in Canada and became one of the world’s longest-living recipient of a Bjork–Shiley heart valve, modelled perseverance in the face of uncertainty.

“Difficult? Yes. Impossible? No,” is one of Dr Yee’s favourite phrases. His Malaysian grandfather, a school principal turned property developer who made most of his fortune in his 80s, taught him that reinvention is worth the risk (and the ridicule).

Laughed at initially for his risk-taking, he went on to build a portfolio of successful companies by trusting instinct, valuing people and adapting quickly to change.

“My grandfather now owns 27 businesses and had government ministers at his 90th birthday party recently. All because he started over in his 40s when most people would have settled,” Dr Yee recalls. “He showed me that age and convention don’t define what’s possible. It’s your mindset that determines how far you go.”

That legacy of calculated risk and resilience became the framework for Dr Yee’s approach to medicine. Where others saw the medical career ladder as fixed, he viewed it as flexible – a series of opportunities to test new ideas, pivot when needed and apply learning across disciplines.

“There’s a big difference between the surgical mindset and the entrepreneurial one,” explains Dr Yee. “The surgical mindset demands precision, repetition and absolute control. You train for years to master one narrow field, to eliminate variables and reduce risk. The entrepreneurial mindset is the opposite – it embraces uncertainty, change and experimentation. It’s uncomfortable for many doctors, but that’s where growth happens.”

Balancing both perspectives has allowed Dr Yee to innovate without compromising clinical rigour. “In surgery, deviation is discouraged. In business, it’s essential. I’ve learned that medicine can benefit from both – structure and imagination, safety and creativity.”

Balancing work and family

Dr Yee is candid about the challenges of finding equilibrium between the demands of practice ownership and family life.

“There are weeks when I don’t get it right,” he admits. “But it’s still far better than the on-call specialist life I would have lived. I’m home more, I’m present, and I can share everyday moments with my exceptionally supportive wife and children.”

His decision to leave surgery was as much about future fatherhood as it was about professional reinvention. “A senior orthopaedic colleague once told me his teenage daughter no longer spoke to him. That conversation stayed with me,” he says. “I knew I wanted to do things differently.”

While he is quick to dismiss any notion of perfection, Dr Yee believes that striving for balance has made him a better clinician. Running keeps him fit while fishing and photography enable him to slow down and reconnect with the natural world around him.

“When you’re fulfilled outside of work, you bring that steadiness back into the consulting room,” he says. He also hopes to travel more widely in the coming years, seeing exploration as an extension of learning. “Travel reminds you how big the world is,” he reflects. “It puts everything – including medicine – into perspective.”

Innovation through collaboration

Today, Dr Yee continues to explore innovation within clinical practice. Drawing on his dual expertise in spinal and skin cancer medicine, he co-developed a new surgical tool designed to improve precision in skin cancer procedures. The idea was first sketched on a napkin after a late-night spine case and 3D-printed by his collaborator within days.

“Innovation often begins with curiosity,” he reflects. “It’s about asking whether something we’ve accepted for years could be done better.”

A vision for modern practice

Dr Yee’s work represents a broader evolution in Australian general practice – one where specialist-level procedural skill and holistic care coexist. His dual subspecialties in spinal medicine and skin cancer demonstrate that GPs can be both technically proficient and deeply patient-centred.

“Medicine doesn’t need to be unidimensional,” he says. “When we create careers that balance purpose, innovation, and family life, we serve both ourselves and our patients better.”