Rocketship is about communities

When Rocketship’s co-founder, Dr Lachlan McIver first visited Vanuatu in 2008, he was taken in by the community of Bene village, on the east coast of Espiritu Santo island in northern Vanuatu, who subsequently became part of his extended family.

In the years that followed, while living in Fiji and Vanuatu and working in over a dozen other Pacific island countries on behalf of the World Health Organisation, Lachlan realised that these spectacular islands, home to countless communities of proud, generous, open-hearted people, had health systems that struggled to provide care to those communities, particularly in rural areas and outer islands. Lachlan called upon his colleagues in the rural medical community in Australia to support their colleagues and peers in the Pacific, and thus Rocketship was born.

Rocketship’s co-founders included leaders in rural generalist medicine and experts in health professional education in Australia – Dr David Campbell, former president of the Australian College of Rural and Remote Medicine; Dr Pat Giddings, CEO of the Remote Vocational Training Scheme; Dr Sam Jones, Director of Primary Health Care in the Torres Strait; Dr Steve Kuartei, former Minister of Health from the Pacific island nation of Palau; and Bonnie Ward, an experienced clinical nurse educator from Melbourne.

Building on its early work in supporting the establishment of Vanuatu’s medical internship training programme, Rocketship was asked to assist with the design and delivery of Timor-Leste’s inaugural Family Medicine training programme. That, in turn, led to Rocketship’s integral role in establishing the first-ever regional Family Medicine programme in the Pacific, in collaboration with Fiji and Tonga.

Throughout this journey, Rocketship has deployed a number of volunteer doctors and nurses to support this work in communities from the urban density of Dili to the jungle of Santo and the ‘Fire Island’ of Tanna. In doing so, the Rocketship community itself has grown, with previous volunteers joining the Board of Directors and bringing unparalleled experience in the process, like Dr Dan Manahan, Executive Director of Medical Services in the Darling Downs in central Queensland.

Rocketship works in partnership with the government health service in every country where our support is requested. We believe that it is primarily through building the capacity of our fellow health professionals that our vision of ‘Health communities across the Pacific’ can be achieved.