But retired Newcastle doctor Peter Saul believes the constant reporting of COVID deaths is not useful in motivating the public, particularly younger people, to get vaccinated.

"I don't think in the end that just reporting deaths from COVID is helpful at all really," said Dr Saul in the first episode of the Newcastle Herald podcast series, Voices of the Hunter.

Instead, he said, highlighting the debilitating effects of COVID might be more helpful in motivating people.

In more than 40 years as a doctor, Peter Saul spent much of his career on the frontline of medicine, as a specialist in intensive care for Hunter New England Health.

Born in England, Peter Saul arrived in Newcastle in 1988. A year later, the doctor, along with the city, was shaken by the earthquake.

"That was truly scary, to be honest," he recalled. "We had patients out on the beach, communications had gone."

Working in intensive care, Peter Saul came to realise that many people avoided talking about the end of life. So as well as using his skills to prolong life, Dr Saul devoted himself to encouraging conversations about death, including for doctors to talk with their patients.

"I think the most important thing by far is that we need to have faith we can have conversations with people that include death, include not treatment, include palliation, without embarrassment, without thinking, 'Oh, this is a defeat'," he said.

Peter Saul also believed patients should be more involved in deciding on what treatment to receive - or not.

"The biggest change I think we're looking for in medicine now is for people to be a bit more up front with their own preferences and their own things they think is seriously important for them, and not just surrendering themselves to the medical process," he said.

Peter Saul shared his views and talked about his life, including a family tragedy that had a profound effect on his work as a doctor, while showing me around his farm on the banks of the Williams River, near Clarence Town, just before the lockdown.

Peter Saul only recently retired - not that he likes that word: "I don't think I've retired, I think I've taken on a whole new, if you like, career."

That new "career" involves the planting of gardens and a food forest, and the "rewilding" of the bush on his farm. He sees links between this work and his former job.

"I spent 40-odd years trying to resuscitate people; now I'm trying to resuscitate trees," he said. "It does feel a little bit the same."

In the process of planting trees and caring for the environment, Peter Saul is "rewilding" himself.

"The whole cycle of life and death," he said of working with nature. "That is, I guess, what I get from this, the cycle."

Listen to Peter Saul's conversation with Scott Bevan in Voices of the Hunter at newcastleherald.com.au

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