I've worked with St John for almost two years as an ambulance nurse.
I'm from East Sepik Province. The main problem in my province it’s very remote. Pregnant
mothers are dying because they can't get to the nearest health centre to deliver their babies.
Let’s go. My first career was working in the hospital, which I felt was a bit
stagnant for me and the way I see St John, the way they were developing it interest me with
pre-hospital care. I've worked my whole career in the emergency department, so I've seen the
transition of the pre-hospital and ambulance service. It existed like, literally like,
a taxi service where on an ad hoc basis we then get a call out to transport the
patient without any monitoring, maybe on the back of a stretcher, if they were lucky,
and then onto the hospital, handing them over, but not really hand over because
there wasn't any structure in place. Back in 2015, we had about two or three ambulances.
We had only one phone operator who was also the dispatcher and the call taker.
Nowadays, every ambulance has a defibrillator and oxygen and medicines that are used to
provide a higher level of care, which fortunately we're seeing is resulting in better survival.
The largest user of ambulance services are women aged between 14 to 30. And the
two most common reasons that we're called to assist is obstetric emergencies and trauma,
trauma affecting men and women. It's a problem that the service has to face every single day.
I generally get called to critical cases like motor vehicle accidents.
A person in very severe pain. Any fitting or seizures, we attend to these cases. We also attend
to major traumas, life threatening bleeding, all these. Snake bites. I always try to calm myself
and reassure myself that I can do anything that comes my way. Working in the emergency department,
you have to be you have to be calm. You’ve seen me when the cases come in, we’re relaxed. Yeah!
Port Morseby General Hospital is always at overcapacity. We've got a set number of
beds. We always have overflow. And so when discussions surrounding COVID had risen,
we already didn't have space enough to cater for all of emergencies that did present. This became
an escalating problem. When we had the second surge, the designated wards had quickly filled
up. We were suffering what you'd call ramping, ambulance ramping. We were starting to see that
happen here. And we were fearful that as as the number of patients continued to increase, that
ramping would become so extreme that we wouldn't be able to reach patients for several hours.
The volume was very high and so the stresses were high. Everyone put on a brave front and
still kept turning up for work. St John was able to pull staff together, get new employees a short
term contract, both support staff and clinical personnel, and therefore generate the field
hospital. We instituted the field hospital, which was colloquially referred to as the Nightingale
Centre that was fully supported by the Australian government. St John, primarily with its reach,
was able to assist in the logistics and the coordination of the facility. Through its
committee, for COVID it was responsible for the medical care to the patients, the admissions,
the discharges and any decisions to refer patients to the General Hospital. So it relieved our burden
at Port Moresby General Hospital a lot. That field hospital had a capacity of 60 beds. That's one
bed more than we could even handle at Port Moresby General Hospital. We were always at full capacity,
so to be able to manage 60 patients was quite a breather for Port Moresby General Hospital.
People are telling me they're astounded that the ambulance turns up so quickly that our ambulance
officers are so caring and professional in the way that they carry out their duties and so for me,
that's an important reason to continue the work that we're doing here. We lose 2,000 women to
childbirth a year. We lose a thousand people a year just to snakebite, you know, an easily
treatable condition. And sadly, the reasons people are dying from childbirth, the reasons people are
dying from snakebite is that they're not able to access the right level of health care that
they need in the time that they need it. St John Ambulance Service is designated as the
national ambulance service. At this stage we are not present across the country. In 22 provinces.
So that's our big objective. We don't have this type of service back in my province. St John being
established in all 22 provinces of Papua New Guinea. That would be a really, really great.