Lot of pressure

ways now that we access, keeping patients out of hospital.”

The LARU costs about $360,000 a year and is designed to attend to “lower-priority” cases that might not require transporting a patient to hospital.

Each LARU attends cases in a smaller “non-emergency vehicle” and is staffed by a fully trained paramedic.

Ms Baxter said for the moment, one LARU vehicle appeared to be enough for the region.

“We have two shifts a day, day and afternoon,” she said.

“And their workload is enough right now, but we can see that it will be the way of the future.” MORE seriously ill children will be able to be treated in the Far North with Cairns Hospital hiring its first paediatric intensive care specialist.

Dr Vijay Palaniswamy is one of two new ICU specialists starting work at the hospital this week. A third is due to join the team next month.

This brings the number of full-time ICU specialists to seven, increasing the unit’s oncall capacity and providing extra expertise when treating younger patients.

Up to 400 seriously ill children are admitted to the ICU each year, including many that need to be flown to Townsville or Brisbane for treatment.

Townsville’s dedicated, stand-alone paediatric intensive care unit (PICU) was introduced about four years ago, receiving on average 15 admissions a day.

Cairns Hospital ICU director Dr Drew Wenck said, while Cairns did not yet have the population to sustain its own PICU, hiring a paediatric specialist would make a major difference to patient flow throughout the unit.

“It will help, because last year, we had 1200 admissions, which is a lot,” he said.

Dr Palaniswamy, who worked previously at the Royal Darwin Hospital, has already treated two children since he started work at Cairns Hospital on Monday.

He said one of the young patients had been suffering complications due to Type 1 diabetes and would have otherwise needed to have been transported to Townsville.

“I think now the number of transports will definitely get decreased and the number of days we’re going to keep patients on ventilators is going to go up,” he said.

“We can treat more challenging presentations of children here, but if they are more complicated, we can still send them to Townsville.”

Many of the patients admitted to the ICU last year were those suffering pneumonia and other complications due to viral illness. Dr Wenck said this was a reminder for Far North Queenslanders to have their regular flu vaccinations.