Retiring medical director’s arrival by helicopter causes a stir

An earthquake or terrorist event would probably overwhelm southern hospitals, outgoing Southern District Health Board trauma services director Mike Hunter says.

Mr Hunter is retiring, but will remain with the SDHB to complete a range of planning tasks, which include drafting a plan for a multi-casualty event.

"That is an area where do I feel we have a weakness in the South, that we are not as well organised and have not planned in the detail that we possibly should have after Christchurch," he said.

On March 15, 2019 51 people were killed in terror attacks on two Christchurch mosques, an outrage the perpetrator had originally planned to stage in Dunedin.

"That planning is a big job that has to be done in the next 12 months."

Mr Hunter, who will be 65 in May, had worked in intensive care and general surgery all his practising life.

After a pancreatic cancer treatment last year, and in deference to his age, it was time to consider whether he could continue to work at that pace, he said.

"I want to try and get some things fixed in the system that need a bit more attention, so I decided intensive care and my rescue helicopter work is a young man’s game and it was time to do a bit less of those sort of things and focus on those system issues and try to get those things better before I actually retired completely."

That planning work included improvements to the management of acute cases, to try to prevent issues with bed block in hospitals from recurring.

Trauma medicine crossed into many medical disciplines and many different types of patients, Mr Hunter said.

While road accidents provided much of the work and got much of the attention, falls provided doctors with as much, if not more, trauma work he observed.

"There are a diversity of medical problems, and they don’t always fit neatly into the way we organise our hospitals," Mr Hunter said.

"I have tried to focus people’s minds on the care of the patient, particularly the multiply injured patient, and to get our systems working as well as they can.

"One of the big challenges of trauma is that it crosses all sorts of speciality boundaries — one patient could have orthopaedic injuries, a brain injury, chest injuries, and abdominal injuries, and those are all dealt with by different specialities.

"It’s about trying to get those people to work together and get the processes right in the emergency department and in the pre-hospital transport phase so they get the best resuscitation and recognition of their injuries."