This time last year, Dr Rik Hagen was on the verge of retirement. He had even almost been to his own goodbye party.
By Ara Jansen
Suddenly, almost overnight, every extra pair of hands was needed at St John of God Murdoch Hospital and Dr Rik Hagen agreed to delay leaving the emergency department where he had worked for more than two decades.
Besides, it “looks bad on the CV if you bugger off at the start of a pandemic,” the senior emergency medical officer says with a laugh.
Dedication, hard work and ability to be a team player in a crisis earnt him the title of 2020’s St John of God Murdoch Hospital Doctor of the Year.
Now the 71-year-old is working a couple of shorter shifts a week and fills in when needed. It is suiting him perfectly. By his own admission, he’s had more comebacks than John Farnham.
Erik ‘Rik’ Hagen was a late bloomer, starting medicine at 27 on top of his agricultural degree. After working in the Wheatbelt for four years and already a father to two, he decided medicine was what he really wanted to do.
While fellow students were busy partying and almost a decade younger, Rik treated his studies like a job and did quite well “until they shook off their sloth and caught up”.
He could have done surgery, but with a growing family – now with three of his four children – there wasn’t the time. He spent between 1985 and 1997 working as a rural GP in the South West town of Harvey doing 50 to 100 baby deliveries a year. Rik enjoyed getting to know people, being able to have continuity of care and knowing Bunbury Hospital was close enough in case anyone got into more trouble than he could handle.
“Unlike the metropolitan area, in the country if you ever saw an ambulance racing through town, you knew you were going to have to go to the hospital to do something,” says Rik. “There was a really good hospital in Harvey. We had a visiting surgeon come every two weeks, but we did the anesthetics and obstetrics ourselves. It was the old-fashioned kind of GP, which, sadly, I’m not sure exists much anymore.”
Travel headache
With part of his family in Perth for school, Rik felt too much like a FIFO, so in 1997 he took a job at St John of God Murdoch in the emergency department and he’s been there ever since. He has also worked for the Royal Flying Doctor Service and is currently a flight doctor for Medical Air.
While working as a clinical skills tutor at the University of Notre Dame, he started writing stories about his medical experiences which he shared with his students. Then during a three-month break in Melbourne a few years ago he wrote a dozen more stories and thought they might be worthy of a book.
An enquiry to a local publisher ended with a contract from a London publisher and Imperfect Recollections was published in July last year. There are more stories for book two on the way.
In Imperfect Recollections, Rik doesn’t reveal names and has left people guessing about who the characters are from the town he talks about. The final story, however, is self-evidently about the death of racing legend Peter Brock. Rik was working on the medical team when Brock had his fatal crash during the 2006 Targa West rally.
Alongside a busy medical career, Rik has also worked his way up to become a top medico in Formula One and World Rally Championships. He is currently the WRC Deputy Medical Delegate for Asia and Oceania at Fédération Internationale de l’Automobile (FIA). That means these days, rather than being on ground tending to accidents, he visits event sites ahead of time to assess their readiness.
“I first got involved when I was in Harvey in 1989 during Rally Australia,” says Rik. “A friend was involved and asked me to give her a hand. I got involved and eventually became their chief medical officer and did a lot of local rallies.”
Rally cry
He says one of the most challenging events to work on as a medico was the Australian Safari, a drive from Kununurra to Kalgoorlie. While helicopters kept an eye on the drivers and cars, the distances made it exceedingly difficult to get to anyone in a hurry.
These days a satellite-based system called RallySafe or RaceSafe, which was created in Tasmania, is now used all over the world and makes tracking drivers and issues overland much easier. The system transmits hazard warnings via in-vessel units in motor sports events on land and water, providing tracking and timing updates. It alerts organisers if there has been an accident plus gives the location for the rescue services to find.
Rik eventually rose to senior national and international positions including being a representative on the FIA Medical Commission, which meets in Paris twice a year. On behalf of Motorsport Australia, he’s been the chief medical officer at four Korean Grand Prix and deputy chief medical officer at the first Russian Grand Prix.
Now, as a FIA delegate, he’s hoping there will be a World Rally Championship event in Japan later this year, after having inspected the Japanese hospital site and medical system in 2019.
“I always tell my friends I’m not a petrolhead, but they just say ‘yeah, right’.” Sometimes he manages to convince them that he is genuinely fascinated by how it all comes together.
At an age when people probably see more of the green on a golf course than the green of their scrubs, Rik’s reason for staying in medicine for almost five decades is quite simple: “You meet people and help them, and you don’t have to be macho and it’s ok to cry.”
People person
“People come in, they are in distress and you can help them, most times. Thousands of years ago, Hippocrates said the goal of medicine was: To cure sometimes, to relieve often and to comfort always. To me, everyone has a story, and a life is full of heroism. I enjoy that. An old friend once told me ‘once you take out 200 lungs, it’s all a bit ho hum’, so, for me, it’s the people you meet along the way, both friends and colleagues, who make life interesting.
“It’s said all emergency department people tend to be Type A personalities who get off on adrenaline. I can still respond like that but these days I tend to leave it to the younger guns. Now it takes longer to recover from the adrenaline highs. I still really enjoy helping people. Maybe I have just settled down a lot. Ah yes, I remember enthusiasm!”
Rik says two words sum up his career: bloody lucky.
While a five-month trip to the UK and Norway (where his parents were originally from) was put on hold because of COVID and Rik not retiring, his now casual status in the ED is allowing him to spend more time down south, digging into historical and spy novels and avoiding the “twin ogres” of bridge and golf while lavishing attention on his eight grandkids. Besides, who else is allowed to give them too much red cordial and Cheezels – and then send them home!
Apparently that retirement party from the hospital is now imminent. Paging John Farnham.