Dr Mandy Wisely is pleased to offer a wide range of palliative care and pain services at Beechnut Medical Rooms.

Good quality palliative care is for living, much more than it is for dying. Many people don’t know that early access to supportive care helps people live better, sometimes longer, and most importantly, on their terms.

Mandy trained in palliative medicine mostly at the Calvary Mater Hospital and then continued to a second fellowship in pain medicine at John Hunter Hospital in order to further develop skills in complex pain and symptom management. Mandy thinks of both palliative and pain medicine as a calling and is every day inspired by the connections she makes with patients, their families and the amazing teams she works with.

Her current hospital appointments are as a Staff Specialist in Pain Medicine at Gosford Hospital and a Visiting Medical Officer in Palliative Medicine at Newcastle Private Hospital. From 2020-2022 Mandy was a Staff Specialist in Renal Supportive Care at John Hunter Hospital, which has been instrumental in developing additional skills in non-malignant palliative care.

Mandy’s palliative care interests include complex symptom management, novel and multimodal analgesia, values-based decision-making, spirituality in life-limiting illness and advanced care planning. Mandy will primarily offer consultations for symptom control and care planning at Beechnut Medical Rooms. Mandy offers admissions to Newcastle Private Hospital for burdensome symptoms requiring inpatient management and end-of-life care and can liaise with the Community Outreach Team at the Calvary Mater Hospital regarding end-of-life care at home.

Pain medicine interests centre around whole person recovery from chronic pain, and include preventing the transition from acute to chronic pain, ‘prehabilitation’ of patients with chronic pain conditions to optimise surgical outcomes, targeted early management of chronic pain conditions (particularly complex regional pain syndrome, post-herpetic and trigeminal neuralgia), safe and effective medication use. Mandy does not offer an interventional pain service but has established referral pathways for patients with complex cancer pain who may require interventional analgesia.

Mandy takes pride in offering a warm, welcoming and thorough practice model that is diverse and inclusive. Her non-clinical time is spent in a wide range of research interests, in education (including as a Conjoint Associate Lecturer at the University of Newcastle), the intersection between humanities and medicine and pastoral care for training doctors.