Ms Jacquie Hennessy
St John Ambulance PNG and Tropicair Aviation partner to provide Medicair, a national aeromedical service providing specialist medical retrieval to communities in the most remote corners of Papua New Guinea. Whilst most retrievals take place between provincial health services and the tertiary referral hospital in Port Moresby, we often end up entirely off the grid.
This presentation discusses lessons learnt on one such aeromedical retrieval, when a call came in regarding two men crushed by a bulldozer outside a small logging village on the southern coast of West New Britain. Inaccessible by road, and over 2 hours from Port Moresby by plane, the nearby road-accessible medical post had no staff, no medications and no supplies, and the nearest provincial hospital was a 30-minute flight away.
With no information about the patients’ condition available, we put together a flight team, and carefully planned our equipment for the mission, given the limited cargo space on the unpressurised Cessna Caravan; the only aircraft capable of landing on the short grass runway at Gasmata.
Hours later we found ourselves waist high in grass, sweating bullets under the harsh tropical sun and managing patients with major head, chest, pelvis and lower limb trauma. With torrential rain threatening our ability to fly, fuel constraints meaning the plane’s air conditioning could not be used, and a sustained game of charades required to communicate through earmuffs on the noisy flight, we had our work cut out for us getting everyone back to Port Moresby alive.
Needless to say, we learnt a lot.
Biography:
Ms Jacquie Hennessy OStJ is the Chief of Clinical Operations and Chief Paramedic for St John PNG and the head of the St John Aeromedical Team. She is a critical care paramedic who trained originally in NSW before taking the plunge into working in Papua New Guinea.