Friday, Sept 13, 2019
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THE INDEPENDENT VOICE OF MID CANTERBURY
The spider Tasman calls returns
Kaitiaki H A K AT E R E
P40
MOTORING
Alan Burgess
Sarah Dean
Chris Ralston
Talking about trauma By Jaime Pitt-MacKay Jaime.p@theguardian.co.nz
The gathered crowd might have been small, but that did nothing to take away from the powerful messages of the four guest speakers at the Road Traffic Accident Trauma Charitable Trust’s Road Trauma Roadshow in Ashburton on Wednesday evening. The roadshow is the second to be held in Canterbury by the trust, and had four guest speakers, sergeant Janine Bowden of the Ashburton Police, chief fire officer Alan Burgess from the Ashburton Volunteer Fire Brigade, Alice Brown who is a nurse and
trust founder Sarah Dean. Dean, who was involved in two car crashes in her early 20s around eight months apart, worked to create the trust after discovering there was a serious lack of support for those who had suffered mental trauma as a result of traffic accidents. “After my crashes it was really tough, I was asking myself why did this happen to me, everything was going perfectly in my life, and I had nobody to talk to about what I was going through,” she said. Having to deal with ongoing physio treatment for injuries sustained in the second crash, Dean
realised there were many people who had to deal long-term with the effects of crashes. Dean worked together with a number of psychologists in Christchurch to form the trust, which works with emergency services to organise Road Accident Remembrance Day, the first of which was held in 2016, and free counselling through the charity hospital in Christchurch. Another guest speaker was Alice Brown from Christchurch, who was an intensive care nurse at Christchurch Hospital who told the story of a motorcyclist who passed away in the intensive care
unit following an accident. The motorcyclist had been in an argument with his wife and drove off on his motorcycle. He then clipped a trailer and crashed, sustaining serious injuries. Brown thought she had been checking in for a simple four-hour shift at work when the call came through about the man who had been brought to the emergency department. “I was thinking who would I know that rides a motorcycle,” she said. Brown spoke about the medical treatment they attempted
to give the man, including drugs to keep his blood pressure up as they pumped two bags of donated blood at a time into him in an attempt to keep him alive. Following an X-ray, the call was made that the man was not going to survive his injuries. “When we got the scans back the call was made to stop giving him blood and to make him look presentable for his family,” she said.
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