HONOURS FOR TWO COASTERS
TWO Gold Coasters have been honoured at this year’s Pride of Australia awards.
They are Dr Jeff Hooper, an emergency specialist at the Gold Coast University Hospital, and Nadine Biddle through her charity work with A Little Means a Lot.
Dr Hooper and Ms Biddle were two of six inspirational Queenslanders honoured at a medal ceremony at News Corp’s Queensland headquarters yesterday.
The Pride of Australia awards, now in their 15th year and supported by Australia Post and Seven News, unearthed and honoured ordinary people who had acted exceptionally, said News Corp Queensland managing director Jason Scott.
Dr Hooper was competing in The Sunday Mail Bridge to Brisbane in September when runner Paul Reball collapsed in front of him, 3km into the 10km race.
Mr Reball had suffered a heart attack and was clinically dead. “I couldn’t feel Paul’s pulse and tried to do what I could,” Dr Hooper said.
Course paramedic Madison Leighton-Jones, who was also honoured, arrived at the scene with a defibrillator to find Dr Hooper “furiously working on the patient”.
“If it wasn’t for Dr Hooper, it would have been a struggle to revive Mr Reball,” she said.
Ms Biddle through A
Little Means a Lot has supported more than 100 families in the Tamborine Mountain area, relocating victims of domestic violence, assisting young single mothers, and organising working bees to maintain the homes of the sick and elderly.
She is also a youth worker at Toogoolawa School at Ormeau – one of only three schools in the country established for at-risk young people.