Mrs Toni (Antonia) Johnston1, MS Amie Eden, Ms Esther Radford, Dr Hansjoerg Waibel
1Health New Zealand – Southern
Biography:
Bio on Toni to come
Abstract:
The Southern Critical Care Flight service was set up in 1993 to provide equitable healthcare access to the scattered ~8% population that resides in the lower 28% of New Zealand’s land mass! Along with evacuating patients to definitive care a founding service principle was also to provide support to clinicians practicing in isolation within our small rural communities – especially in challenging situations.
In over 30 years there have been several occasions where the AME team have provided phone advice or flown to a scene & assisted the local healthcare professionals in managing end-of-life care for their patient, providing support & debriefing following challenging clinical episodes.
As the population ages and vacancies in rural areas become harder to fill clinicians are finding themselves more isolated, under-resourced & lacking in on-site collegial support with whom they can discuss the most appropriate course of care – is there a clear benefit to the patient of transferring them away from their family and community, or can we support our colleagues to continue to provide appropriate care where they are currently based.
While interrogating our clinical database revealed this aspect of our service accounts for <5% of our work we were interested to explore this further and compare our data with the experiences of services across Australasia & the worldwide AME / patient transfer service community.