Dr Deb grew up in Ireland and completed her medical training there. Since moving to Australia in 2014, she has worked as a medical officer for the RFDS in NSW and Western Australia.
Q: What prompted your move across the world to Australia?
A: I wanted to broaden my horizons and travel. A couple of Irish doctors I knew had already made the move to Australia and they were very encouraging. A recruitment drive to get Irish doctors to move to Australia was underway back in 2013 and once I made the decision to move it was a straightforward process.
Q: What appealed to you about joining the RFDS?
A: I grew up in Dublin within a two-minute walking distance of Ireland’s largest paediatric hospital. I spent much of my childhood outdoors playing sports and would often see helicopters land at the children’s hospital. This fascinated me and all my young friends. Sometimes play would stop completely to watch the helicopter come into land. Everyone would wonder what part of rural Ireland the child had come from and was it going to be for an organ transplant or was it a trauma case? In Perth I came across an ad for a job with the RFDS in Broken Hill. It automatically appealed to me as the idea of aeromedical retrieval had always seemed adventurous and exciting.
Q: What area of medicine do you specialise in?
A: I am a GP by trade and I also have advanced skills training in anaesthetics. My job in RFDS now includes covering the Clinical Coordinator role in the Regional Operations Centre and I enjoy combining my clinical skills with the logistical component of deploying planes and people to achieve the best outcome. I have many fantastic colleagues and the work is very much team oriented. People from all walks of life work for RFDS and it gives me a great sense of satisfaction to be part of something that is much bigger than myself. We operate 24/7 for 365 days of the year and no two days are the same.
Q: What is the greatest challenge of being an RFDS doctor?
A: Sometimes we fly into remote settings to manage and transfer patients who have life or limb-threatening injuries. These cases rely on the team all contributing fully together to get the best outcome for the patient. We do often rely on the support from people and farmers on the ground to make our retrieval successful and time efficient.
Q: What is the most satisfying part of a RFDS retrieval?
A: Our patients and their families are genuinely, enormously grateful for our work and commitment. We are helping to provide care for rural and remote communities. We have sophisticated medical equipment and superb aircraft and pilots. Our jet has the capability to fly from Perth to Kununurra, which is further than the distance between London and Moscow. It can be very rewarding to manage a patient who is critically unwell and get them safely to intensive care in Perth. I have such great respect for the pilots, flight nurses and paramedics I work alongside. Our pilots are incredibly skilled and fly solo at all times of day and night. Our flight nurses are trained to an exceptionally high skill level and their role contributes enormously to patient safety.
Q: What is your involvement with the Australian Defence Force?
A: I am a Reservist with the ADF and work as a part-time army doctor. The skills I learn in a military setting are complementary to and transferable to my work with RFDS. Both roles involve giving back to the community and I feel it is a privilege to serve.
