Photograph taken out on a rural air-strip a few years ago, in Western Australia.
I took this picture while waiting on a small dirt runway in South West Australia while our patient waited on a stretcher in a corrugated iron shed. Emergency night transfers at the time required the State Emergency Services to set up runway lights in the dark. Today, many rural air-feilds have runway lights activated from the closest major metropolitan city, which is usually a few hundred kilometers away. Small, remote sites do still often rely on a local farmers's paddock (Boyupbrook have a fabulous paddock) for patient evacuations. The Royal Flying Doctor's planes will often land before us and pull up a few feet away from the ambulance. The patient is then transferred onto another trolley out in the open, on the runway, and then we load them up for their flight.
One winter's afternoon, after a long drive through the Stirling ranges, our ambulance was diverted to an airfield in Albany. Two other ambulances were already waiting. Here, out on an icy tarmac, I met up with Val, a nurse I had worked with 17 years before. Delighted to catch up, we spoke briefly on the runway while a young doctor from Perth climbed into each ambulance to examine two patients destined for ICU and to do a ring block on a young man's badly injured hand.
*Most of the present Western Australian health sites are preventing nurses and doctors from recording their experiences online and recent health department directives have made it an offence to keep online diaries of their unique work practice.
