Today the Medical Outreach Registrar took me along on a trip to one of the remote Aboriginal community clinics on Croker Island. The day started off at the small charter plane hangar at the airport, an event that’s becoming all too common on this trip to Oz. There were two DMOs (District Medical Officers), a pediatrics consultant, a medical student, & a nutritionist on our flight. The pilot let me ride up front in the co-pilot seat (for the 2nd time).
Croker Island is about a 50-minute flight from Darwin off the coast of the NT. I listened to my ipod on the flight to block out the deafening sound of the plane’s engines. We landed on a dirt airstrip. The registrar, the nutritionist, one of the DMOs, & I disembarked while the rest of the group continued on to another remote community. There was a covered platform next to the dirt landing strip where one of the clinic nurses was waiting for us. There wasn’t enough room in the truck for all of us, so the nutritionist & I waited on the platform while the first group drove into the community, which is about a 15-minute trip on the other side of the island from the airstrip.
The area around the airstrip is a floodplain filled with sundry wildlife including all varieties of birds, wild horses, & crocs. The community consists of about 300-400 people & is nestled over the island’s coast. The clinic building is spacious & new because it was recently rebuilt after the original was destroyed by a cyclone a couple years ago. The community, consisting of the tribal council building, a school, homes in various stages of disrepair, & a small store, spread out before the clinic, which sits atop a hill overlooking it all.
The patients slowly trickled in over the course of the day. Patients aren’t given scheduled appointments. A nurse simply rides through the town in the ambulance announcing that the doctors are here & makes a special effort to encourage patients with issues to come to clinic. I saw a few patients along with the other registrar, & then broke away to see a few pediatric patients on my own.
I saw a pair of brothers, one with a recent asthma exacerbation & the other with recurrent boils on his hands & feet, which had previously cultured out staph & group A strep, which luckily were sensitive to most antibiotics. I prescribed flucloxacillin for the skin infection. I then saw a 19-year-old first-time mother with her seven-day-old baby. The mom had a bad case of mastitis of her right breast, which engorged, painful, & woody hard, but the baby was doing well & almost back to birth weight & managing okay feeding off the unaffected breast. I prescribed the mom a course of antibiotics (dicloxacillin) & asked the community nurse to check the baby’s weight again in a few days.
At the end of the day, after all the patients had been seen, I took a walk through the community. Families were sitting underneath the shade of trees in front of their homes while children ran about & dogs slept on porches. It only took a few minutes to make a round about the entire community. I visited the store, which had a meager selection of foods all of which were priced about 60% more than what they’d cost in the city. I was warned to take a stick along to keep the dogs away, but the dogs didn’t pay me any interest in the afternoon heat.
Above is a picture of the clinic as seen looking up from the community.
No comments:
Post a Comment