Sorry dear readers about the lack of posts last month, but I have been kept busy with some different activities around Dubbo...
Last week I took a road trip with a colleague around western NSW with the purpose of visiting the new hospital at Tamworth ahead of its opening next month. This was to get ideas and advice, as we are now planing the construction of a new hospital at Dubbo, including a $150M emergency department. Over the next few months I will be visiting other recently opened or about to open emergency departments to help plan the layout etc of our new one. I also took the oppurtunity to stop at some of the smaller hospitals and health services in our catchment area to meet the GPs there and look at their facilities. On the map above we started at Dubbo, 7 O'clock on the red ring, and travelled counter clockwise around it. We first stopped at Dunedoo and met the staff there and looked around their hospital before travelling through to Coolah to look around the hospital there. We stopped for lunch their and then headed northwest past the black stump...
Most people in Australasia will be aware of the colloquialism "beyond the black stump" which means someone lives in the middle of nowhere. This is the site of the original black stump outside Coolah which gave rise to the saying.
We traveled on past hundreds of kilometers of varying countryside, which was nice as I had formed the impression that most of the greater NSW area was barren red dirt, but a lot of it is arable farmland with a mixture of grazing stock...
We arrived in Tamworth by nightfall, and then met the staff at the emergency department the next morning, where we discussed several issues facing healthcare in our areas before taking a tour of their new department. I can remember taking the walk-through of the new department at Waikato before it opened. It is very odd to walk through a space so empty and still which you know will never be that way again once it opens. Here are a few pictures...
Above and below: Views of the nurses and doctors stations in the main acute areas.
Below: The treatment cubicles in the acute areas.
After our tour we set off for home, travelling from Tamowrth at the top of the loop left towards Gunnedah, then through Coonabarabran and Gilgandra before making it home again at night fall...
We did encounter a few minor obstacles on the way - it is never comfortable rounding a bend to find cattle strolling across the road...
So May was a fairly busy month, punctuated by some different tasks rather than the daily grind on the ED floor. Having experiences like this and opportunities to be involved in creating a new department and taking on more leadership roles really makes the job worthwhile as it is something which most people don't get to do as early on in their career, so it makes one feel a valued part of the team. In the coming months we are going to visit St George in Sydney, and Wagga.
Hopefully I will be able to share some pictures of the progress at WBP this month.
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