David Bradford graduated from Sydney University in 1965 and has had an interest in Sexual Health since serving as a Regimental Medical Officer in the Australian Army in South Vietnam in 1967 and 1968. After a brief flirtation with Surgery and Orthopaedics, obtaining the FRCS from the English and Edinburgh Colleges, he spent a period in General Practice in the east end of London in the seventies and then decided to devote his professional life to Sexual Health Medicine.

After training at the Lydia Department at St Thomas’ Hospital, London, he returned to Australia as Director of the Melbourne Communicable Diseases Centre in 1980. In addition he spent six years in private practice predominantly in HIV and Sexual Health Medicine in Melbourne at the height of the AIDS epidemic in gay men and then moved north to Cairns in 1993. From 2000 to 2003, he was President of the Australasian College of Sexual Health Physicians and assisted in the transition of that College into a Chapter of Sexual Health Medicine in the Adult Medicine Division of the RACP. The Chapter was formed in early 2004, replacing the former College. Until his retirement from full-time practice in 2004 he was Director of the Sexual Health Service at Cairns Base Hospital.