It’s a calling many doctors will be familiar with – the one to make a difference. It was that calling that inspired Dr Elizabeth Green to follow a career in medicine.
Her desire to help others saw her travel from remote North Western Australia where she grew up in Kununurra to study medicine at the University of Melbourne.
After an application for a GP position got lost, a spur of the moment decision in 1988 saw Dr Green apply for a job at the Royal Flying Doctor Service (RFDS) Eastern Goldfields base in Kalgoorlie.
A number of experiences pinpoint Dr Green’s journey into medicine. One was seeing her dad treated in hospital for hepatitis as a young girl.
“That’s the first time I realised people get sick and I started thinking about that,” Dr Green told Medical Forum.
“Then when I was eight, I was in a plane with my dad – it was a Bible Society plane and we were travelling to an outback station – and a call comes from the RFDS to ask if we can divert to pick up a man who has fallen in a fire and is badly burned.
“I just remember the tone in the aircraft changed. There was this feeling that something bad was happening.
“I remember this man getting into the plane, he was badly burned, he was wrapped in a wet blanket and he was shivering. My dad was air sick and I helped him with a bucket while looking at this man trying to be reassuring.
“I thought ‘maybe I could be a doctor’… and I think somewhere there must have been an interest, that feeling that you can make a difference.”
Stories like this, and many others of her time as a RFDS doctor and paediatrician in Perth, are detailed in her memoir No Time for Makeup: The life of a flying doctor and paediatrician.
She looks back on her time in Kalgoorlie as a time when she worked to the full scope of her practice, wearing many hats to deliver care to the people in the town.
She recalls doing a ward round at the hospital when she first arrived, where she often looked after patients, and asking the surgeon who the paediatrician was. He replied: “You are.”
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“At that stage Kalgoorlie didn’t have an obstetrician, a paediatrician… so I was suddenly realising that I was it,” she said.
“That was the scariest part I suppose, when you got a call in the middle of the night and it was a distress call to a child who was ill. You’d get into the aircraft and you’d be in the pitch black of night flying on dead reckoning with no GPS.
“You didn’t know what medical condition the child would be in when you landed, and you just had to think ‘Have I got everything here to cope with this situation’. That was the most challenging thing.
“But you knew you made a difference. Without the remote nurse and the RFDS, that child would have died. Sometimes that kid might be an hour or two from death and you know that RFDS plane is their lifeline.”
One story that would send shivers down anyone’s spine is that of a rescue of a miner trapped underground at the Lady Bountiful mine outside of Menzies after a rockfall.
Dr Green had to venture underground to care for the miner. The 11-hour ordeal saw the man successfully rescued.
“It was a pretty challenging situation, everything about it was. The physicality of the mine was very close, it was damp, it was hot” Dr Green told Medical Forum.
“It was also surreal. I’d never been down a mine and here I was, inappropriately attired as it turned out, and I got to this man who was trapped.
“He was hanging out of a rock wall, basically, and I remember looking at him thinking ‘is he alive?’.
“The worst thing was you could hear the rumble of the mine – it was an unstable mine. When I got to this man I must have looked terrified and I’m trying to put on my doctor hat, asking all those questions you ask as a doctor, and then hearing these rocks falling like a thunderous roar.
“This wonderful man said to me ‘don’t worry, that’s from one or two levels above us, but if it gets closer and the mine is going to collapse, I’ll let you know so you can run’.”
Among the nerve-wracking stories are more humorous ones. Like the time Dr Green and the RFDS went to pick someone up from Eucla who had a snake bite, but it turned out they’d just had a few too many, fallen down a sand dune and had a spear of spinifex bite them on the leg.
Reflecting back on her time as a paediatrician, including a traumatic stint at King Edward Memorial Hospital that still makes her feel emotional, Dr Green worries for the future of the specialty as waitlist expands and cases become more complex.
“There are about 10,000 kids on the waiting list in Western Australia now and when I finished my private practice in 2022 there were about 6000. I knew things were going to get worse because I was seeing 1500 to 2000 kids a year on my books and they had to go somewhere,” she said.
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“A lot of my colleagues are also winding down in private practice for different reasons, so I think that the child waiting times, and the workforce issue is an ongoing, critical problem.
“I don’t really know how that is going to be resolved other than spreading resources and diluting paediatrics, so people won’t get to see a paediatrician very often.”
She hopes the “heart and soul” she put into her career in medicine and the importance of trust between a patient and their doctor comes across in her memoir.
She also wants it to be a timely reminder to those in positions of power – like politicians – that medicine is a challenging profession, one that is becoming harder in the face of more complex care needs and high patient demand and needs proper investment and resource.
No Time for Makeup: The life of a flying doctor and paediatrician, is available online and in bookshops.
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