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Back on the mic for former Goodfellow deputy in new venture
Patrice Dougan
pdougan@nzdoctor.co.nz
Wednesday 28 January 2026, 01:40 AM
3 minutes to Read
Specialist GP and clinical educator Louise Kuegler has launched a new podcast and mentoring service [Image: Supplied]
ESSENTIALS
Former Goodfellow Unit deputy director Louise Kuegler has launched a new podcast and mentoring venture.
The podcast aims to tackle tricky topics not covered by other CME material.
The project is currently self-funded.
Getting into the nitty-gritty of interesting, tricky cases is how Louise Kuegler describes her new podcast venture.
The former Goodfellow Unit deputy director, University of Auckland tutor and specialist GP has launched a mentoring and clinical education service, with a podcast at its heart. In The Specialist GP, Dr Kuegler takes cases submitted by listeners and fellow GPs, then sits down with an expert to dissect the issue and lay out the best approach.
This is the point of difference, she says. “Which is quite exciting, I think, because other providers do a fabulous job, but it’s the big topics that we often revisit – you know, diabetes and gout and vaccination and COPD. But the things that I find interesting, those topics weren’t really getting the airtime that they could have.”
So far, topics have included teen health and sexting, risk assessment and suicide, diving, and hyperbaric medicine. “The sort of things that are really important, but you don’t see those cases all the time. So, when you do see them, you’re not quite sure what to do with them.”
There are also episodes on clinical leadership, which she sees as an important topic for GPs who “often…end up in leadership roles where we haven’t had leadership training” and accessing that training can be “tricky”.
Dr Kuegler stepped down as deputy director of the Goodfellow Unit in August last year after 10 years with the organisation, during which she helped develop clinical education content and hosted the unit’s podcast.
After she left, she says, she reflected on what she loved most about the role and concluded: “It was the podcast development.
“And I loved shaping those conversations and bringing out the best in the expert guests to make the knowledge relevant for primary care,” she explains.
After hearing from colleagues who wanted to hear more from her, she “reflected on what was happening in the sector and realising now that specialist GPs are often working at the top of their scope and our learning needs are perhaps more specialised and more complicated and at a higher level than perhaps some of the basic CME that was in the sector”.
She decided to launch her own venture – The Specialist GP podcast and mentoring service – using her clinical education and general practice backgrounds and her experience leading the National Contact Tracing Service during the COVID-19 pandemic as a base.
The first episode was released in early October, and so far, the feedback has “been lovely”, she says.
“It’s been really wonderful that people are sending their cases in. And I feel really stoked that people are getting up behind me and loving what’s happening.”
Listeners love that it’s locally made, clinical case-based and “very practical”, she says.
Dr Kuegler tries to tackle the topics she often jotted down on her list to cover at the Goodfellow Unit, but because they weren’t industry-sponsored or were less mainstream, they ended up languishing at the bottom.
“But actually, they were the ones that often people had reached out [and asked] ‘Could you cover this’, but I just didn’t have the capacity to do that.”
She doesn’t see herself as competing with Goodfellow, as she’s covering different topics and “there’s enough room in the sector for more podcasts”.
She’s taking inspiration for topics from listener requests, discussions in GP forums and local research, which she feels need more attention or topical issues.
“There was one that [came out on 24 November] on osteopenia and the inspiration for that was [Distinguished Professor] Ian Reid and [associate professor] Mark Bolland from the University of Auckland had published a paper, and it was practice-changing, but it hasn’t made its way into formal guidelines,” she says. “But actually, we should be considering implementing that research now because it was absolutely practice-changing.”
She likes to round off each episode with some key takeaway points and is attempting to keep each episode “commute-friendly or treadmill-friendly” in length, 15 to 30 minutes. “That bite-sized, easily digestible time span for busy primary care people.”
The venture is currently self-funded, and Dr Kuegler is hoping to keep it that way, as “it’s really important to have very unbiased and independent content available” and to build trust and credibility within the sector, she says.
New episodes of The Specialist GP podcast are released at 6am every other Monday and are CME-eligible.
Listen Here:
https://www.thespecialistgp.co.nz/podcasts
