Region first in hyperbaric medical care

THE Townsville Hospital was the first public hospital in Queensland to provide a hyperbaric medicine unit.

The unit provides about 3000 emergency and routine medical treatments to patients every year.

Emergency treatments are typically for decompression sickness or cerebral arterial gas embolism. Routine treatments include nonhealing diabetic wounds, conditions associated with poor circulation, chronic bone infections and soft tissue injury healing after radiotherapy.

The unit can treat up to seven patients a session and can run up to three sessions a day.

Hyperbaric medicine units treat decompression sickness by recreating the conditions a diver would experience while scuba diving.

By doing this the atmospheric conditions that are recreated increase the pressure of oxygen in the blood.

By administering high doses of oxygen, the nitrogen bubbles that cause the injury get displaced and shrunk by the oxygen with the aim to restore normal oxygen flows to tissues.

For a routine “dive” the rate of oxygen administered is about 40 litres per patient per minute.

In emergency cases this can increase to a mix of oxygen and helium at a rate of 100 litres per minute.

In 1985, a hyperbaric chamber was located at the Australian Institute of Marine Science in Townsville.

Townsville anaesthetist Dr Vic Callahan began utilising that facility to treat divers with decompression sickness.

In the late 80s that hyperbaric chamber moved to the old Townsville General Hospital and became the first hyperbaric medicine unit in Queensland.

In 2001, during the move to the new Douglas campus, The Townsville Hospital obtained a new state- of- the- art triple lock chamber that is still in use.

The team also has a 24/ 7, 365 day- a- year emergency on- call service. This includes a doctor, a technician and two specialist nurses.

The only other hyperbaric medicine unit in Queensland is at the Royal Brisbane and Women’s Hospital.