It is January 2020 and Australia is on fire. The following is a story from a GP on the front line who seized the initiative to safety net her community.
My colleague Dr Lee Simes and I have put together a medical room at the St George’s Basin Country Club evacuation centre, and have a list of 5 local GPs and 8 local nurses who are ready to come in as needed. We decided to offer our services because we expected our community might be isolated by fires for days, possibly without power. The evacuation centre team welcomed us with open arms, and our conversations since then have been about “why don’t we have General Practice embedded within our emergency and evacuation plans?”
Calling an ambulance or driving to the hospital are absolutely the right thing to do for the right patient at the right time, but when there are embers and dense smoke closing our roads, maybe having patients seen by GPs and community pharmacists - with the right equipment, training and experience, working with NSW Health and St John Ambulance volunteers - ought to be an option included in the emergency plan, and not just something that the local on-call doc and pharmacist put together on their own. The experiences from our GP and pharmacist colleagues further south demonstrate the value and importance of the primary care team when the ambulance and hospital are simply not available.
I’m looking forward to meeting with the right people in leadership positions to make sure this can be done for when the next (inevitable) fire emergency comes around. For now, I’m just looking forward to packing up my gear, blissfully unused I hope, a few days from now .... fingers crossed!
Dr Kate Manderson
GP from Nowra on the NSW South Coast
January 4, 2020
