Dr Kelly Lai, Banyo Clinic
Some general practices become more than a place people visit when they are unwell. Over time, they become part of family stories, milestones, difficult seasons and everyday life in a community.
Banyo Clinic is one of those practices.
Last year, the clinic marked 70 years of care with a community celebration that reflected exactly what the practice has come to mean to local families.
“Our clinic has been around for 70 years,” says GP and Clinic Director Dr Kelly Lai. “We celebrated our 70th birthday with a big community event and invited a whole stack of alumni GPs and the community. That’s something we’re obviously very proud of in terms of what it means to the community.”
For Dr Lai, the event was also a reminder of how deeply the clinic is woven into local life.
“At our celebration we had one family with four generations still seeing us as patients,” he says. “From great-grandma through to the youngest kid, they were all still actively seeing us.”
That long connection is reflected not only in the patients who return, but in the role the clinic continues to play beyond its consulting rooms – through outreach visits to nursing homes, schools and local businesses, and by hosting events that invite the wider community in.
“We run regular community events where even if you’re not our patient, you’re invited to come along. It’s about bringing people together and reinforcing the sense that the practice is part of something bigger than just appointments.”
Continuity of care as a defining strength
For Kelly, one of the defining strengths of general practice is the long-term relationship between patient and doctor, and the trust that grows over time.
“What we value above most is maintaining that continuity and that genuine GP-patient relationship, because we know that long-term GP-patient relationships really matter in terms of delivering better outcomes.”
In a healthcare environment where convenience often drives short-term interactions, Banyo Clinic continues to place strong value on familiarity, trust and really knowing patients.
“We try to be more than a place for just episodic care,” Kelly says. “We want to be that centre of support and community connection and navigation.”
That thinking shapes the way the clinic approaches care – not simply as individual appointments, but as an ongoing relationship built through consistency and understanding.
Respecting the legacy of the practice
The clinic’s history is closely tied to the Morris family, whose long involvement helped shape both the culture and continuity of the practice over decades.
For many years, family members were involved not only as doctors, but across reception, nursing and management roles.
“It was a very strong family practice in that sense – not just that patients were families, but that staff were family too.”
Although the clinic has grown significantly from its beginnings as a two-doctor practice in a two-bedroom house, that legacy still shapes the practice today.
There is a strong sense that each generation of staff is caring for something they have inherited, and responsible for carrying it forward well.
“There is that sense of legacy and responsibility,” Kelly says. “We’ve been caring for the community for such a long time, and there is a lot of respect for the doctors and staff who contributed over the years.”
Quality built into everyday practice
That same long view also shapes how the clinic thinks about quality.
At Banyo Clinic, quality is not treated as a separate project or something that only becomes visible during accreditation.
“It’s in our habits; in our communications,” Kelly says. “The goal is really to make quality and risk management a conscious and deliberate part of our practice, not something we only deal with in response to a problem.”
That means systems are discussed regularly, responsibilities are shared across the team and improvements are approached proactively rather than reactively.
For Kelly, accreditation works best when it supports that everyday thinking.
“Our experience with QPA has always been very supportive,” he says. “It never has felt like a tick-box exercise. It feels more like a partnership around quality development rather than a case of they’re coming in to judge us.”
That approach aligns naturally with the clinic’s own values around continuity, trust and steady improvement.
“Accreditation isn’t about one moment in time,” Kelly says. “It’s about recognising the fact that we’ve actually been doing this the whole time.”
A surveyor’s perspective
Alongside his role at Banyo Clinic, Kelly also contributes to quality improvement more broadly as a QPA surveyor and sits on the Queensland Faculty Council of the Royal Australian College of General Practitioners.
That dual perspective – practice partner and surveyor – gives him a strong understanding of both the pressures practices face and the purpose behind accreditation.
His own decision to become a surveyor grew from positive experiences with QPA through the clinic’s accreditation journey and from seeing how valuable external perspective can be when improving systems.
That broader perspective reinforces something Banyo Clinic already understands well: strong systems matter most when they quietly support care every day.
We’ll explore Kelly’s surveyor role more deeply in a future article. For now, Banyo Clinic’s story offers a strong reminder that quality in general practice is often built quietly – through consistency, shared values and respect for the legacy a practice has been entrusted to carry forward.