Heli­copter retrievals in loca­tions with­out run­ways,
and oth­er remote drawcards

Kep­pel: I can remem­ber back to when I was work­ing in Jabiru, this was before there was a res­cue heli­copter ser­vice in the North­ern Ter­ri­to­ry. If some­body fell over in the bot­tom of Jim Jim Falls or But­ter­fly Gorge or some­where amaz­ing in Kakadu, the clin­ic would co-opt one of those Robin­son tourist helicopters. 

The nurs­es would fly off and go and pick the per­son up, and bring them back to the clin­ic for treat­ment while we arranged a fixed-wing back to Dar­win. That type of expe­ri­ence is not some­thing you get in a big city hospital. 

Then, you would come togeth­er in the evening and you would dri­ve, after you had closed the clin­ic for the day, to Ubirr Rock and watch the sun­set over East Arn­hem Land hav­ing walked past these amaz­ing, thou­sands and thou­sands of year-old pieces of art on the rock faces as you climb up – quite incred­i­ble expe­ri­ences that you just don’t find in a city hos­pi­tal where you’re stuck in the com­mute dri­ving to your shift, then you do your shift, and you’re stuck in the com­mute going home again, perhaps. 

And that close­ness of the clin­ic staff as well… I’ve heard over many years of facil­i­tat­ing with CRANAplus some of the most incred­i­ble sto­ries around very small teams of peo­ple doing very excel­lent clin­i­cal care to keep some­body alive until they get trans­ferred to more defin­i­tive care, which is absolute­ly remarkable. 

I have the utmost respect for clin­i­cians that spend their careers…working in these environments. 

Cross­ing the divide to become an educator

Kep­pel: My con­tri­bu­tion to remote health­care has been with CRANAplus, vol­un­teer facil­i­tat­ing on their Mater­ni­ty Emer­gency Care and Mid­wifery Upskilling cours­es, and I’ve been doing that now for over 12 years.

Some years are pret­ty busy, with eight or nine cours­es a year. The last few Covid years have been a bit quieter.

So while I don’t have the capac­i­ty at the moment to work in a rur­al and remote area, I main­tain my engage­ment and the small part that I can play is by bring­ing qual­i­ty edu­ca­tion to the rur­al and remote health work­force around mater­ni­ty care.

The Mater­ni­ty Emer­gency Care course is pre­dom­i­nate­ly for nurs­es and health work­ers, and doc­tors that haven’t done obstet­rics. For first-timers, it’s an intro­duc­tion to the world of the dark arts of mater­ni­ty care.

So, we real­ly go from the con­text of mater­ni­ty care in rur­al and remote set­tings, which is sig­nif­i­cant­ly chal­leng­ing at times, to some of the mater­nal mor­bid­i­ty stuff to real­ly set some con­text. Then we go from ante­na­tal right through to postnatal.

Many of our rur­al and remote nurs­es and mid­wives play a sig­nif­i­cant role in good ante­na­tal and post­na­tal care par­tic­u­lar­ly if their com­mu­ni­ties don’t offer birthing.

We have a vari­ety of mater­ni­ty emer­gency skill sta­tions and edu­ca­tion around those emer­gent sit­u­a­tions so that they have got a bit of a back-pock­et of skills if they were to have a woman birth in their remote location.

The Mid­wifery Upskilling course is for mid­wives and often we have GPs that have done their obstet­rics diplo­ma that work out bush they might come along as well. It real­ly is that knowl­edge refresh­er, as we know, health­care moves in leaps and bounds.

The oth­er bonus with Mid­wifery Upskilling is that it is often one of the rare oppor­tu­ni­ties that mid­wives that work in quite iso­lat­ed loca­tions have to come togeth­er as a col­le­gial group.