In love with Alice Springs — Kylie's pitch for working in the Centre

26 Aug 2024

Registered Nurse, clinical educator and CRANAplus course facilitator Kylie Huxtable, admits she ‘shamelessly promotes’ her current hometown of Alice Springs to participants considering remote work in Central Australia.

Kylie has been facil­i­tat­ing Remote Emer­gency Care (REC), Advanced Remote Emer­gency Care (AREC), Advanced Life Sup­port (ALS) and Triage Emer­gency Care (TEC) around the coun­try since 2021, trav­el­ling to Ade­laide, Dar­win, Broome, Nhu­lun­buy and Hobart, as well as facil­i­tat­ing in Alice Springs. She says many course par­tic­i­pants take advan­tage of the oppor­tu­ni­ty to net­work and get advice and infor­ma­tion about inter­est­ing places to start remote nursing.

When you think of remote nurs­ing, you think of the iso­la­tion”, says Kylie. Alice Springs I believe pro­vides the per­fect bal­ance for new­com­ers to the remote nurs­ing expe­ri­ence: iso­la­tion with sup­port. You are not alone.

The style of nurs­ing in Cen­tral Aus­tralia is vast­ly dif­fer­ent to any­thing else­where in the coun­try, con­sid­er­ing the pop­u­la­tions we have here and the vast­ness of the areas that we cov­er – down to the APY lands in the south and over to the bor­der with West­ern Australia.

We are a big town, with a hos­pi­tal large enough to sup­port a real­ly big area, but it is still iso­lat­ed enough to give nurs­es a real­ly good foun­da­tion. It’s a step­ping stone.

Alice Springs, in par­tic­u­lar, is suit­ed to those par­tic­i­pants who want to get a real­ly good feel for work­ing in Cen­tral Aus­tralia,” says Kylie, who has lived in Alice Springs for more than six years.

I believe Alice Springs is a great place to get your foot in the door.

After a few months in the Emer­gency Depart­ment, they will get con­fi­dence to branch out and go to more remote locations.”

Kylie also rec­om­mends the lifestyle in Alice Springs, and is grate­ful that her chil­dren, six in all, are hav­ing this opportunity.

The camp­ing is ter­rif­ic, the lifestyle is relaxing.

It does have its social prob­lems, absolute­ly, but it does not hin­der the charm of liv­ing here. Alice Springs often gets a bad rap, but I intend to stay here for a few more years.”

Kylie’s nurs­ing back­ground is in crit­i­cal care, start­ing in Can­ber­ra where she grad­u­at­ed. She spent two years in the Coro­nary Care Unit (CCU) and the rest of the decade in the Emer­gency Depart­ment, work­ing her way up to a team-lead­ing role with­in that depart­ment and then moved onto an edu­ca­tion role.

I worked on FIFO con­tracts in far west Queens­land for a time and spent three months in Kan­da­har Air Base in Afghanistan run­ning a clin­ic for Air traf­fic con­trollers,” she says.

I also spent a decade as an army reservist work­ing as a com­bat medic. I have com­plet­ed a para­med­i­cine post grad course and an Emer­gency Nurs­ing grad dip.

When I moved out to Alice, I went back to the bot­tom of the pile, and worked in ED again, work­ing myself up into a ward-based edu­ca­tion role and then onto the hos­pi­tal-wide Clin­i­cal edu­ca­tion team.

Whilst on this team I began devel­op­ing edu­ca­tion for RAN’s in Cen­tral Aus­tralia and did the REC so I knew what was about and what the RANs were learn­ing. My role now is an edu­ca­tor to the entire nurs­ing staff at Alice Springs Hospital.”

Facil­i­tat­ing with CRANAplus fits in per­fect­ly with Kylie’s career pro­gres­sion. In the role as edu­ca­tor for RANs, it was sug­gest­ed it would be good for me to do the cours­es, and then that moved to being a facil­i­ta­tor on the cours­es,” she says.

I love that shared expe­ri­ence you get on the cours­es. As a facil­i­ta­tor, you learn some­thing every time, from the par­tic­i­pants and also oth­er facilitators.

I love to get inspi­ra­tion and ideas from oth­ers and mod­el my nurs­ing on things I learn from them.

And the pos­i­tive feed­back from par­tic­i­pants is always a wel­come part of the role.”

Con­tin­ue read­ing about CRANAplus edu­ca­tion with these arti­cles from vol­un­teer facil­i­ta­tor Jason and mater­ni­ty edu­ca­tor Aman­da.