The first effective triple-combination therapies for HIV infection in mid-1996 was the most positive experience in my life as a physician. Within a few months, the majority of my patients who were becoming more and more immune-suppressed, turned around, began to regain weight and feel better, with their immunological function beginning the slow but steady climb to more normal levels.

At the time I was Director of Sexual Health in Cairns. It was a truly transforming experience for me and far more for my many HIV/AIDS patients, to realise that HIV infection need no longer be a death sentence.

At the beginning of 1987, I opened a general practice in Carlton Victoria, with a major interest in Sexual Health and HIV/AIDS. I had resigned at the end of the previous year as Director of the Melbourne Communicable Diseases Centre, the then name for the city's public clinic for STIs and HIV/AIDS.

A few weeks after opening the surgery in Carlton, I had a phone call from Dr Peter Greenberg, a general physician at the Royal Melbourne Hospital (RMH), asking me if I would consider working once a week at a newly established outpatient clinic for HIV/AIDS at RMH. I had not met Peter Greenberg before, but he explained that he believed the clinic needed input from a community-based clinician with sexual health experience and particularly experience in the diagnosis and management of STIs.

I welcomed the opportunity and for several years, until I moved from Melbourne to Cairns in 1993, I continued to work once a week with Peter. We became firm friends, and I learned a great deal more general medicine and compassionate patient management from him than I ever learned in medical school or on the wards as an intern or registrar. Our professional relationship made a lasting impression on my subsequent medical practice and I am eternally grateful for that crucial phone call.

In 2000, I became President of the then Australasian College of Sexual Health Physicians (ACSHP), a College which contained great passion and enthusiasm amongst its Fellows for the specialty of Sexual Health Medicine, but which was small in numbers and unrecognised within the wider profession.

Over the three years of my Presidency, I revived with the RACP negotiations, which had lapsed a few years before for lack of progress, with a view to merging the ACSHP in some way with the College. Due to the good will of Dr Geoffrey Metz and later Professor Napier Thomson with whom I was asked to negotiate, considerable headway was made. It truly was an enjoyable and rewarding experience, even if tough going at times, to negotiate with those two physicians.

In 2004, the ACSHP was merged successfully with the College to become the Australasian Chapter of Sexual Health Medicine.