Discussion on UN work for series
“It’s the kind of thing that stays with you. You feel for everyone — it is etched in the staff’s memory, and not in a pleasant way.”
Dr Jan Bone is talking about February 22, 2011, the day a 6.2 magnitude earthquake devastated Christchurch and the emergency department specialist led the response at the city’s hospital.
The quake left 185 people dead, including one of Dr Bone’s colleagues, and presented an extraordinary challenge for the hospital team.
Dr Bone will be in Whanganui on Thursday, November 21, to talk about her experiences of the frontline at a time of disaster.
She is giving the Porritt Lecture at the Whanganui War Memorial Centre with a theme of Trauma — Disaster & Recovery. It is the 50th anniversary of the lecture series run by the Whanganui District Health Board.
“It was such a blur … there were so many people being brought in,” she recalls. The quake wiped out a lot of communications, computers were down and the power kept failing.
“It would suddenly go black … sometimes the generators kicked in; sometimes they didn’t. We were in ED in the pitch black and we couldn’t use the lifts to get to intensive care or the imaging department.”
At one point, she got student doctors to watch TV news so they could find out what was happening outside.
Since that day, Dr Bone has taken a particular interest in the wellbeing of staff.
That was put under severe strain on March 15 this year when the terrorist attack on two mosques in Christchurch resulted in 51 deaths and the hospital inundated with the wounded.
Dr Bone was not there for that traumatic event, something which still upsets her.
“I was rostered on but I swapped with a colleague because I had to go to Australia for some specialist exams. It’s difficult thinking about it because you know you could have been useful there that day.”
She said the earthquake followed by the shootings had left many staff unable to comprehend the enormity of the events and said people were “really traumatised”.
Dr Bone has more than 30 years’ experience and a key role in Christchurch’s emergency department, one of the busiest in Australasia, averaging about 300 patients a day.
*50th Anniversary Porritt Lecture; Dr Jan Bone: Trauma — Disaster & Recovery, Whanganui War Memorial Centre, 7pm, Thursday, November 21. Free admission.
U3A’s lecture series continues with something completely different on Friday, November 22.
Scandals have arisen in UN peacekeeping with failure to protect populations and accusations of abuses. This has challenged the UN ideal of “neutrality” and “impartiality” and risked mission success.
Dr Bethan Greener, Associate Professor in the Politics programme at Massey University will discuss some of these. She will outline two recent initiatives to improve UN peacekeeping practices. Dr Greener will explain what they might mean for the future of UN peacekeeping. She is lead investigator on a project examining engagement between militaries and academia.
Her research includes the relationship between liberalism and the use of force, how states seek to use their various agencies for security provision, international policing through the UN, South Pacific security, and the nature of the relationship between public and private security. She is also a Senior Fellow with the Centre for Strategic Studies, Victoria University.
U3A Lecture Series Friday, November 22, 2pm at St Andrew’s Church Hall, 42 Glasgow St. Free. Tea, coffee and biscuit. Koha welcomed.