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Global health feature
Q&A with Jenni Lillingston Surgical News talks with the RACS Global Health Timor-Leste Country Office Manager
What have been some of the key challenges in Timor-Leste so far? The journey to Dili included an unplanned three-week stop in Darwin due to the Timor-Leste border closing (which included two hotel evacuations due to fire alarms in the middle of the night). This was followed by a further two-week quarantine. After finally making it to the office, Timor-Leste extended the COVID-19 State of Emergency, meaning we needed to suspend training and community outreach activities. After rapidly moving our post graduate courses online, Dili and parts of Timor were hit by the worst floods in 40 years. In addition to substantial damage to many houses (including those of our staff, clinical educators and trainee doctors) there were significant ongoing power and internet outages.
Jenni Lillingston (right) with Dr Celestina (left), one of the recipients of the RACS scholarship for Masters in Medicine (Surgery)
Can you describe your professional background? I am an experience development leader with over 20 years of experience in relationship, governance and program management in senior positions both in Australia and internationally. I originally led policy and management reforms and program delivery in the Commonwealth and Victorian Departments of Finance, Treasury, Premier and Cabinet, Human Services and Auditor General. After a Christmas holiday epiphany, I made the move across to international development sector where I could combine my programming experience in community and health development, with my love of travel and experiencing different countries and cultures. While completing my Masters In International Development I undertook a number of assignments including with
UN Country Office (Timor-Leste), a local health non-governmental organisation in Calcutta, and a number of short consultancies in the Solomon Islands. Since then I have worked in Cambodia for SNV Netherlands Development Organisation, in Dili for the Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade (DFAT) funded WASH program with Australian Red Cross (ARC). I began my current role at RACS at the end of 2020. What do you enjoy most about international development work? I enjoy working with a range of partners to build positive change. I appreciate working in environments where I can build on my experience in a different way from what I would be engaged with in Australia. The diversity of issues and exposure to new contexts and ways of seeing the world constantly help me reconsider approaches to my work.
There was a rapid escalation of positive COVID-19 cases in Dili, leading to continued extensions of the State of Emergency order. Our key partners, Hospital Nacional Guido Valadares (HNGV) and the Ministry of Health, are fully engaged in mitigation and response actions. Despite these challenges we continued to keep the RACS office operational, delivering RACS education programs , developing clinical educator capacity at HNGV, supporting other COVID-19 related response training, establishing district eye clinics and securing essential supplies and equipment. I am particularly proud that we managed to complete the Family Medicine Post Graduate program online and conduct the required exams. This took incredible commitment and hard work from the RACS teams and the clinical education team from HNGV and Maluk Timor, as well as from the trainees themselves. Now that staff and our clinical partners are fully vaccinated, we have been able to resume face-to-face activities in Dili and continue travel to the districts. We are moving quickly to restart training and clinics.
