Crocs, tinnies and a waiting game: GPs in the storm

For Dr Brett Scott, crocodiles are a genuine worry.
 
A long-serving GP in Ingham, he is in one of the areas hardest hit by storms currently inundating north Queensland.
 
Devastating flooding over recent days has seen hundreds of residents across the state seeking safety in evacuation centres, with up to 600mm of rain falling in some areas.
 
Dr Scott has owned the Ingham Family Medical Practice for the past two decades in a town where road closures and a collapsed bridge on the arterial Bruce Highway have left a community isolated from the outside world.
 
With a submerged electricity substation, there has been no mains power even for his clinic on the emergency grid, and a backup battery bank has kicked into place for the vaccine fridge.
 
But even with the complete commercial shutdown pausing all pathology and pharmacy, he is still pitching in wherever he can.
 
That has mostly been in his tinnie, navigating the floodwaters in a ‘flattie’ he normally uses to indulge a passion for fishing.
 
An early port of call was naturally his own clinic. While surrounded by waters, it stood above the waterline of the town’s worst flood since 1967, crucially preserving the CT scanner and ultrasound machine.
 
Accompanied by his son Giordan and his accounts manager’s husband Paul Groundwater, Dr Scott also used the boat to transport and loan out two generators, which others have used to help keep the community’s mobile phones alive.  

He has also fetched and distributed fuel from the service stations that can still operate.
 
These are not quite the rounds he imagined when he started in general practice almost 30 years ago – but he sees this as part of a community spirit that rises with the floodwaters.
 
‘The reason Ingham is such a close-knit community is that you’re forced to get to know your neighbours,’ he told newsGP.
 
‘In events like this, you rely upon each other in a way that you don’t in a lot of other communities.’
 
These are not the first floods he has navigated, and he is only too aware of the risks.
 
‘You have to be mindful of people who may only have a few centimetres left before water enters their house and destroys their belongings,’ he said.
 
He also recalls during the previous storms there was ‘a fair-size croc’ eating wallabies in deeper floodwaters.
 
‘Crocodiles are a real concern and a reason most don’t walk through deep flood water like we used to,’ he said.


The Ingham Family Medical Practice surrounded by floodwaters. 

On Sunday, the Ingham community had another tragic reminder of the dangers with the death of a 63-year-old woman travelling in a rescue boat.
 
‘I feel very sorry for the crew of that boat, for the loss of their passenger, but also their own lives, which would have been at risk,’ Dr Scott said.
 
In fact, he has nothing but praise for the response of the council and emergency services and feels the collapse of the Bruce Highway bridge was impossible to predict.
 
However, he expresses frustration with the ongoing power outage, which he did not expect after the infrastructure investment that followed Cyclone Yasi in 2011.
 
‘Even the medical centre on the emergency grid has lost power, and I did not anticipate that level of vulnerability of power supply,’ he said.
 
‘In a world that today relies upon communications more heavily than ever, if you take all that away from us … we’re impotent. It’s frustrating. We’re all at the whim of electricity.’
 
For Dr Stewart Jackson, a long-serving GP at Hinchinbrook Health Care in another part of Ingham, the waiting game is also underway.
 
He is thankful that his clinic has also stayed dry, and that its use of a cloud-based system means it should be relatively easy to get back up and running – but he is very conscious that many in the community are doing it tough.
 
‘We’re talking about nursing homes with no electricity, we’re talking about a lot of elderly people trapped in their homes,’ he told newsGP.
 
‘I imagine in the weeks coming up, that’s where it’s going to get very challenging: the backlog, and the fact we’re already backlogged and that we are under-doctored.’
 
RACGP Rural Chair Associate Professor Michael Clements has also been affected by the storms, with his Townsville and Magnetic Island clinics shutting temporarily.
 
Now getting back to normal, he said the floods illustrate the importance of disaster preparedness.
 
‘In Queensland, we expect to get ready for cyclone season, but in bushfire areas, practices are maybe less prepared,’ he told newsGP.
 
‘We do think the government needs to remember our key role and the importance of us getting up and running again by looking at things like disaster protection and prevention.
 
‘With the effects of climate change, we should be expecting more climate instability, and we should be expecting that general practices will become more and more affected by this and need to be prepared with the right supports.’
 
For both Drs Scott and Jackson, a further concern is the impact of natural disasters on their ability to recruit in an area already short of GPs.
 
As long-term residents, they have no regrets about settling and working in Ingham – views they happily share even with the floodwaters barely having peaked.
 
‘If you want to get a feel for a true, fully rounded career, then look towards areas such as this, where you learn to live with nature, you learn to compensate for what’s coming your way, and you develop resilience,’ Dr Scott said.
 
He says the floods are just one part of the story.
 
‘There’s often a bit of a catastrophic feel to things, when for us it’s really just an annoying part of life that you deal with if you want to live in the wet tropics.’
 
Dr Jackson makes a similar point.
 
‘We live in North Queensland, we know what the deal is,’ he said.
 
‘I’d love people to come here, see what a beautiful place it is where we live.
 
‘This flood’s a bit bigger and there are people who will be doing it very tough. But yeah, we’re ready to bounce back when we can.’
 
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