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Doctor reaches for the stars
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edical researcher? Check. Paramedic? Check. Astronomer? Check. Eumundi doctor Dr Paul Baker really isn’t joking when he says he brings a wealth of experience to his role. Before studying medicine, Dr Baker spent 10 years in medical research after completing a PhD in Biochemistry and Physiology. This included arterial disease research and two years working on diabetes research in Oxford. “The aim was to understand how a person’s dietary fat intake affects their insulin sensitivity and diabetes,” he says. Driven by a desire to help in a more hands-on way, he then went on to spend a decade as an intensive care paramedic, or ICP. “I loved paramedics but I wanted to take caring for people to the next level and also challenge myself, so I decided to study medicine,” he says. As a doctor, his career continued to focus on emergency medicine, with extensive hospital experience, time with the Royal Flying Doctor Service, and a year as a retrieval doctor with LifeFlight. “My first day at LifeFlight was a cracker,” he says. “We were called out for a patient who had fallen off a cliff face and had multiple bone injuries. He was a climber, a pretty fit young fella, but he had got it wrong on the day. We parked the helicopter on top of the mountain and I walked out to assess him. He was in bad shape so we had to airlift him off the side of the mountain – and I really don’t like heights! “Unfortunately, that wasn’t the end of my day. My crew and I were then called out for a motorcycle rider who’d crashed at high speed. I had been an ICP for many years and seen horrible things, but that was without doubt the most critically injured patient I had ever seen. Thankfully I had one of the best paramedics with me and we got through
it together. We gave the patient everything he needed, resuscitating and stabilising him before taking him straight to the operating theatre. He faced a long recovery and lifelong impairment, but he lived.” Dr Baker, who has lived on the Coast with his family since 2017, has joined Ochre Medical Centre Eumundi and is looking forward to the variety of general practice, while maintaining his interest in emergency medicine. “General practice is a real area of need, particularly in rural areas, and I just want to be useful and help people,” he says. He will practice at Ochre four days a week while keeping up his emergency medicine practice via a weekly Intensive Care Unit shift at the Sunshine Coast University Private Hospital. Away from work, Dr Baker is an avid astronomer and astrophotographer. “I was always interested in science as a kid and when I was 13 my parents bought me a telescope,” he says. “Now I use telescopes and camera lenses to capture the beauty of the cosmos, photographing objects that are millions of light years away.” Dr Baker’s favourite photo is this one he took of the Rho Ophiuchi, a constellation of nebulas in the Sagittarius constellation near the centre of the Milky Way. “It’s very beautiful and very colourful,” he says. “You don't pick it all up with the naked eye, even through a telescope, but a camera is more sensitive and captures the detail. “It's not just one click, it's a composite of hundreds of photos that are exposed from 30 seconds to five minutes depending on how faint the object is. Then you have to load them into a computer program that stacks and integrates them and brings colours out.”
Dr Baker's photo of Rho Ophiuchi
Bramwell Morton speaking at a Wishlist Centre milestone event
Youths to help shape direction of care
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unshine Coast adolescents will have the opportunity to access a new era of local mental health services thanks to Wishlist. The local health foundation has committed to directing $436,000 towards a parental resilience group and youth advisory group – to be activated in the Australian-first Wishlist Centre opposite Sunshine Coast University Hospital – over the next two years. Wishlist CEO Lisa Rowe says the funding will help Sunshine Coast Hospital and Health Service staff enhance care, informed by lived experience, for the increasing number of youth with complex mental health issues that have escalated during the pandemic. “Two hundred young people are referred a month to the mental health department and this number is not slowing down,” she says. SCHHS service development and research coordinator Bramwell Morton, an experienced clinician and registered nurse, will work with project support officer Sarah Hickey and a group of adolescents who have experienced child youth and mental health services to provide a platform to amplify their voice. “These groups have the power to change the lives of adolescents and their families like we’ve never seen before in the mental health service environment on the Sunshine Coast,” Mr Morton says. “We really want to put it back on the adolescent group members and say we want to look through your eyes and create a better system for a legacy into the future.”
Visit wishlist.org.au. MAY 2022 SUNNY COAST TIMES
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