News

Climate change is set to trigger food shortages, deadly disasters and disease outbreaks that would dwarf the toll of the coronavirus according to medical journal The Lancet.

In its annual “Countdown on health and climate change,” the Lancet provides a sombre assessment of the dangers posed by a warming planet. More than a dozen measures of humanity’s exposure to health-threatening weather extremes have climbed since last year’s report. Australian Rural Doctor and physician with Médecins Sans Frontières, Lachlan McIver said, “If nothing else will drive the message home about the present threat that climate change poses to our global society, this should.”

To read more goto https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/inaction-climate-change-imperils-millions-lives-rocketship-

 Rocketship is looking at new projects. We have further work in "virtual" support in Pacific Island developing countries, including very low resource countries, for medical practitioners with strong clinical experience, Pacific Island experience, mentoring and education expertise. Volunteer roles will require availability to work in a virtual space in distance modelled modalities. If health equity and universal health care in countries with real need is an interest for you, watch this space for a future expression of interest process. The commitment will have real impact, will not be onerous, and can be done from wherever you are located as long as you have internet access.

A Washington Post feature said, "Climate change is set to become the “defining narrative of human health,” a top medical journal warned Wednesday — triggering food shortages, deadly disasters and disease outbreaks that would dwarf the toll of the coronavirus. But aggressive efforts to curb greenhouse gas emissions from human activities could avert millions of unnecessary deaths, according to the analysis from more than 100 doctors and health experts." To read the article click here

Press release:

Australian Rural Doctors are working to improve the health of many throughout Pacific Island Communities despite the Covid-19 pandemic making travel almost impossible.

Working through Rocketship, an international not-for-profit organisation based in Australia, doctors who typically work in Rural and Remote locations across the Australian bush and Outback are providing their expertise to build better and more resilient healthcare in Pacific Island Communities.

Rocketship stands for Remote Opportunities for Clinical Knowledge, Education, Training and Support for Health in the Pacific. The organisation was co-founded in 2015 by Dr Lachlan McIver a rural generalist currently working for World Health Organisation. Leading Rocketship is Queensland Rural GP, Dr Dan Manahan.

The current training, in partnership with the Australian College of Rural and Remote Medicine, James Cook University, Tonga Ministry of Health and Fiji National University is designed to boost post-graduate medical training in Pacific Countries.

Current Rocketship board chair Dr Dan Manahan said, ‘thanks to a new program at FNU, the post-graduate training programme that Australian rural specialists are currently supporting in Family Medicine is helping establish a higher quality of care within the Pacific. Eventually, it is Rocketship’s hope that Pacific Islander graduates will in turn become future trainers.’

Dr Manahan said that Australian rural and regional Doctors are now not only helping keep their own communities safe and well during the Pandemic, but are helping build resilient medical care in Pacific Island Countries also.

Like many of the Rocketship’s educators, Dan Manahan is a rural doctor based in Queensland’s granite belt in the Southern Downs town of Stanthorpe.

He said, ‘Improving post-graduate training will also eventually mean sustainable improvements in primary health care, reductions in morbidity and mortality from non-communicable and other diseases. And that’s a significant boost for some of the poorest and most remote countries in the world.’

With a training course now established in Tonga, even as the Pandemic prevented doctors from travelling to provide post-graduate Family Medicine training, the expertise, skills and knowledge of Australian bush doctors shone as they modified their training to provide support on-line.   

The FNU Family Medicine Program supported by Rocketship is the only post-graduate health education that has continued to provide training through FNU despite Covid obstacles to face to face training. This was achieved by pivoting to online distance education modelled on the Australian rural experience.

‘This is some of the best of the Australian bush doctors reaching out to and supporting our Pacific neighbours. Their efforts will eventually mean that ultimately many deaths from diseases like diabetes and malnutrition will be prevented and the health and wellbeing of remote communities will improve,’  Dr Manahan said.

Until now Fijian and Tongan doctors wanting to specialise in General Practice have had to undertake training in either Australia or New Zealand.  The Postgraduate Diploma in Family Medicine and Master of Family Medicine provides a country-specific course that allows doctors to train locally while still living and working in their own communities.

‘The distance education model Rocketship provide means doctors from Tonga and other communities are able to stay in their communities while they study.  It's particularly important in the more remote areas where their departure would have a big impact on families and communities,’ he said.

Dr Manahan added that the distance education during the Pandemic and hands on training when able, means the collaborative Rocketship training ‘is a game changer for under-resourced and remote communities when you have doctors who can provide primary health care, which is a corner stone of universal health care across Pacific Countries’.

Rocketship wrapup

Today’s news is a boost for the Pacific during the Pandemic – we need your help to keep this work going.

It’s as simple as going to www.rocket-ship.org/donate. Anything above is $2 is tax-deductible. Every little bit goes a long way!

Media contact:David Gilchrist media@rocket-ship.org ú phone 0409894944ú

Research:

The aims and outcomes to date of these health workforce initiatives in PICs, focused as they are on improving healthcare access and health outcomes for rural communities, in particular by training specialists in family/community/rural hospital medicine, are closely aligned with the recommendations of the World Health Organization (WHO) in their seminal report, Global strategy on human resources for health: workforce 2030 (26). Those same objectives are similarly aligned at the regional scale with the “Healthy Islands” vision for the Pacific (7). Some of these case studies from the Pacific have, in fact, already been used as exemplars in WHO guidelines for rural workforce development in low- and middle-income countries (27). The rural generalist model is acknowledged to be one of the most strategically valuable and effective means to achieve a higher standard of medical care for rural communities (28), including in island settings (16, 29), such that the establishment of these programmes is certainly timely, if not long overdue.

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