Antarc­ti­ca is the cold­est, dri­est and windi­est con­ti­nent. A land of such extremes may not attract a native or per­ma­nent pop­u­la­tion, but it does play host to an itin­er­ant pop­u­la­tion of sci­en­tists, adven­tur­ers and tourists.

With the south­ern­most continent’s aver­age tem­per­a­ture rang­ing from ‑10 to ‑60°C, any Antarc­tic pro­gram or expe­di­tion requires exten­sive pre-depar­ture plan­ning and edu­ca­tion, and is made pos­si­ble by tem­per­a­ture-con­trolled facil­i­ties and spe­cialised equip­ment. Stereo­typ­i­cal health con­di­tions asso­ci­at­ed with extreme cold (like hypother­mia and frost­bite) are there­fore rare.

“The role for a health­care pro­fes­sion­al work­ing in this envi­ron­ment encom­pass­es not only treat­ing peo­ple with prob­lems but extends to help­ing plan what is often a logis­ti­cal­ly com­plex expe­di­tion so that it is achieved safe­ly and func­tion­al­ly,” Dr. Edi Albert says.

Clin­i­cians work­ing in this envi­ron­ment are often required to do so at an extend­ed scope of prac­tice due to resource lim­i­ta­tions and dis­tance from out­side help. 

To demon­strate the real­i­ties of retrieval, Edi gives an exam­ple from the Antarc­tic Penin­su­la, one of the more active areas, where you’ll find nation­al sta­tions (e.g. Amer­i­can, Chilean, Ukrain­ian, British) with doc­tors and tourist ships with dif­fer­ing med­ical capabilities.

“If we were in a small tourist yacht and we had a prob­lem, we could prob­a­bly trans­fer a patient to a big­ger ship,” he says.

“They could steam all the way up to King George V Island and arrange a mede­vac from South Amer­i­ca or keep going: it might only be 48 hours across the Drake Pas­sage and back to Ushua­ia, Argenti­na, where
there’s a hospital.”

How­ev­er, he notes that evac­u­a­tion can cost tens of thou­sands of dol­lars – mean­ing it is fre­quent­ly insur­ance-based – and that some­times there may be lim­its to what can be done.

“You might have to just put up with more dis­com­fort and risk because evac­u­a­tion sim­ply takes longer and might not even be pos­si­ble,” he says.

“For exam­ple, at the sta­tions in the mid­dle of win­ter, it may not be pos­si­ble [to evac­u­ate] for sev­er­al months. That then tells you what sort of lev­el of health care pro­vi­sion you need to have.

“Work­ing in an iso­lat­ed envi­ron­ment requires you to be pre­pared to extend your scope, impro­vise and take cal­cu­lat­ed risks because after all, health­care is real­ly about risk management.”

A range of non-clin­i­cal skills will also enable health pro­fes­sion­als to thrive when work­ing in an extreme, iso­lat­ed envi­ron­ment like Antarctica.

“In sci­en­tif­ic, recre­ation­al, and expe­di­tion con­texts, it’s often about, ​‘what roles or func­tions can you fill out­side of health­care?’,” Edi says.

“You’re not always going to be doing a lot of health care, because you’ve got healthy peo­ple. Can you dri­ve a boat? Can you dri­ve over-snow vehi­cles? Can you just muck in with a shov­el and clear the snow? What are you like at cook­ing? Can you play a musi­cal instrument?”

While nurs­ing roles with the Aus­tralian Antarc­tic Divi­sion are cur­rent­ly very lim­it­ed, there are cer­tain­ly oth­er mar­itime and expe­di­tion opportunities.

The supery­acht indus­try employs nurs­es and you may find your­self work­ing not only as a nurse, but also as a stew­ard, boat dri­ver, surf­ing or div­ing guide, or crew­ing a sailboat.

If a job in this envi­ron­ment appeals to you, Edi advis­es you to fol­low the appren­tice­ship mod­el of build­ing up skills bit by bit through a grad­ual expo­sure to more extreme work­ing envi­ron­ments, or through cours­es like Uni­ver­si­ty of Tasmania’s Expe­di­tion Med­i­cine or Med­ical Care on Off­shore and Inland Waters.

This can help to build resilience, prepar­ing you to work effec­tive­ly in a con­text where you may face the para­dox of iso­la­tion and lack of pri­va­cy, the inter­play of dif­fer­ent per­son­al­i­ties, and what may seem to be a harsh and strange environment.

“The thing that brings peo­ple back is that they just love being in that environment.

“It calls to them. It sings to them, and they feel at home there as opposed to feel­ing at home in a flat in a city. You meet your tribe. It could be a sense of belong­ing that peo­ple find,” Edi says.