Good reads

• specialised clinical services • the workforce to support those services, ensuring that the former drives the latter to the extent possible. The recent workshop in April 2022 enabled all partners and the key donor, DFAT, to come together to discuss the future programming—not only for PIP—but for the Pacific Regional Clinical Services and Health Workforce Improvement Program. The partners and clinical Fellow representatives agreed that the model needed to acknowledge the increasing shift towards localisation and regionalisation of development resources. There was also consensus that the two key objectives of quality clinical services and health workforce development were relevant and needed to be continued into Phase 2 of the PIP. RACS Global Health Fellows and staff would like to thank partners SPC and FNU and our donor, DFAT, for the opportunity to join this valuable partner reflection process. We look forward to sharing information on the PIP Phase 2 as we progress planning on this critical program.

Sad Joys on Deployment

Greg Bruce This engaging memoir is based on Dr Greg Bruce’s 10 deployments with the Australian Defence Force (ADF) as an orthopaedic surgeon in the Royal Australian Air Force Specialist Reserve. Dr Bruce describes the challenges of military surgery—the good and bad, and the satisfying and distressing aspects of immersion in a war zone. Dr Bruce’s first deployment was in Rwanda in 1995 in response to the terrible massacre of the Tutsi people by the Hutu. He shares his many learnings, including the inadequacy of the UN. His second deployment in 1998 was to Vanimo in Papua New Guinea in response to the tsunami. He went on further deployments in East Timor, the Solomon Islands and then onto Iraq, which he describes as his ‘longest, most confronting, most stressful, most demanding and most interesting of all’. Dr Bruce was sent to Iraq in late 2004 after the USA had declared ‘mission accomplished’ but was still having problems exerting control in the country. Suicide bombings and high-velocity gunshot wounds were common. The hospital he worked in provided emergency medicine, trauma surgery, intensive care and aero-medical evacuation for combat casualties and orthopaedic and general surgeons with subspecialties such thoracic, vascular, neurosurgeon, among others. His ninth deployment in Bali was brief and dramatic. He was sent there in response to the second terrorist bombing of October 2005, which saw the death of 20 people and more than 100 people injured. In 2008, Dr Bruce returned to the Middle East, this time based in Afghanistan as the orthopaedic surgeon component of an ADF Medical Task Force. Dr Bruce describes the contrasts and similarities of his deployments in an engaging manner, sharing his growing experience and management of surgical cases in what were sometimes quite challenging conditions. Dr Bruce’s book is available to buy from all bookselling websites.