Emergency Parry Packs are being Removed from the Wheatbelt Health Sites. 3oth Nov.2018.

Goomalling, Western Australia. 2018. Photo by D.Quirke. 

Attendees at the Senior Nurses Leadership Group were instructed yesterday to remove the emergency Parry Packs from all Western Australian wheatbelt sites. The Parry Packs were supplied to rural and remote area health sites and  nursing posts in 1996 to support our capacity to deal with trauma. It can take between one and three hours to cut a casualty out of a motor vehicle on isolated roads. I would like to say that I personally do not support this action. I have always endorsed the use of and availablity of the Parry Packs, having worked in rural and remote areas for years. The packs are medium weight, large high visability back packs that contain equipment for dressing wounds, suturing kits, chest drains, basic dressings, and airway equipment. From a personal perspective, it's not about the cost (the packs and contents are over a thousand Australian dollars) but the purpose. I feel if they haven't been used, then we were lucky...very, very lucky. 
Dheborah Quirke. Senior Registered Nurse.

Western Australia... Two new jets for RFDS.

"The New semi-Geometric Possibility"

photograph by D.Quirke. 

"Our E.T.A will be in 17 minutes..." are words that fill us both with relief and cold pressured fear.  I don't know how many times I have heard them over the years. It means the ambulance will pull up in seconds and I have to have a patient 'ready to go', copies of every document photocopied, and answer the questions thrown at me by someone's family while I attempt to calmly make last minute calls. It also means that I've probably got 5 minutes to get ready because it takes 12 minutes to get to the runway. Heofonlic angels will soon arrive as we finish unpacking bits of hell. 

A short time later, I might be standing in an aeroplane hangar  under the shadow of large, silent propellas, or outside on a runway. Sometimes a plane pulls up next to our ambulance moments after we park and sprays us with fine gravel. I don't know how many times I have wished I wore seven padded jackets. Sometimes we stand in tin sheds. Once an ambulance volunteer held a tiny injured bird while we loaded a patient onto a trolley out under a black, silent, star-lit Heaven's Gate. 

Next week, two new Pilatus PC24  jets are being made available for casualty and emergency retrieval at Jandokot for the RFDS and Broome base. West Australian RFDS presently uses Pilatus PC12 single engine, pressurised turbo prop planes which can hold two stretchers and seat 3 people. These can fly at 450 km per hour. Emergency RFDS retrieval expert Hakkan Yaman describes them as "mini I.C.Us in a tin can". These tin cans can glide.

Dheborah Quirke. 27th November 2018.