It's quiet

Usually in summer we hear sirens, jet skis and illegal fireworks, brought on by the influx of Sydney tourists, but this summer I can only hear the relentless wash of the waves on Collingwood Beach.
It’s almost a relief, until I remember why. 

Relentlessness is what characterizes this summer’s fire emergency.

It’s not a single event where the plane has crashed, the waters have risen, and you can be pretty comfortable that the recovery phase is what comes next.
A month ago during our regular treatment trips to Children’s Hospital Westmead, the ward was full of smoke.
On New Years Eve I was on a pontoon boat with my husband and daughter getting home to our other daughter, because the Princes Highway was closed at South Nowra.
This time last weekend I was setting up our little room at St George’s Basin Country Club evacuation centre.
On Thursday I was prepping in case it happened again.
Last night the southerly buster threatened to push more fires up to us. 

So far in Jervis Bay?

Nothing

The embers were defended by the unsurpassable New South Wales Rural Fire Service at Sussex Inlet, Basin View and Tomerong.
Our trees are standing, our kangaroos with joeys happily grazing on my green front lawn, our roads are open.
But here’s the thing - we have fires to our North, South and West.
We have dense bush that hasn’t been burned since 2001.
We have 2 months left of the longest, scariest bushfire season we have ever experienced.

We watch, in a bizarre mix of survivor guilt and vicarious trauma, while our friends and colleagues around us burn and struggle.

And we wait, hoping we will get through unscathed.

Dr Kate Mandelson, GP
January 11, 2020 #AustralianBushfires
First published on the private Facebook page, GPs Down Under

Emergency response

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