NEWS Ambos hit bush reality
FOR the next 24 hours, Tennant Creek’s Intensive Care Unit responded to sick babies, insect bites, abdominal pain and toothaches.
We would arrive to patients who had run out of paracetamol and others who were simply lonely.
One woman who called triple-0 for “anxiety” told us she just wanted someone to talk to as her husband was in jail in Alice Springs and her kids had been removed from her care.
It was the sixth time she’d rung for an ambulance in as many weeks.
When I remarked later about how assertive Larrissa had been with the patient’s relatives the night before, she attributed it to working as a nursing assistant for 10 years before joining St John.
Working in Central Australia is a challenging environment, not least because of the language barrier with the indigenous population.
Other than the station manager, all of the paramedics working in Tennant Creek have been there for less than a year and for some it’s their first experience of the Northern Territory, outside of their initial eight weeks of training in Darwin.
New recruits quickly learn strong communication skills including how to coax information out of people whose first language isn’t English.
For Zoe, the job in Tennant Creek has been a steep learning curve.
“I would definitely say the clientele is different to what I’d trained with in Sydney,” she said.
“It can be difficult to communicate with the indigenous population sometimes.
“A lot of times they tend to say yes if they don’t understand the question.”
She’s also found other aspects of working in a predominantly indigenous community confronting.
“It was definitely a shock going into a camp,” she said.
“The living conditions are quite shocking.
“To see that people actually live like that is quite confronting.”
Treating patients in difficult conditions also presented challenges. “You have to be more concerned about where you put stuff and conscious of hygiene,” Zoe said.
“There are hazardous things laying on the ground sometimes.
“The camp dogs can come out of nowhere as well.”
But it’s a real world experience junior paramedics in urban areas don’t experience.
“You get to do a lot more on bigger jobs because you don’t have back up,” she said.
“I’ve never considered calling back up before because we don’t have that option here.”
St John Ambulance – a charitable not-for-profit organisation – privately runs the ambulance services in the NT and in WA.
In every other state and jurisdiction ambulance services are government run.
They are on the front line, treating the region’s long-term chronic problems of alcoholism and indigenous disadvantage. These are the untold stories of courage, compassion, dedication, resilience and inspiration of a caring group of remarkable and selfless firstresponders in two of the toughest towns in Australia.