Emergency department grows four-fold at Launceston General

The four-fold increase of doctors has been driven primarily by Dr Lucy Reed, the director of the emergency department at the LGH.

The increase followed the recruitment and training of more FACEMs, doctors who represent the pinnacle of acute emergency medicine.

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"A FACEM is a fellow of the Australasian College of Emergency Medicine, that's our professional college and you're a fellow once you've completed all your exams," Dr Reed said.

"You've gone through medical school and you've done probably five years, postgraduate, then you do another five years of emergency training, and then you become a fellow after a number of different exams, and then you take responsibility for the emergency department. "In that role, you supervise junior doctors, you train up junior doctors, and you run the place."

Building experience in the ED has been a long-term goal for Dr Reed since taking over its directorship in 2016, saying it has taken her five years to grow the ED senior staff from three to 12.

"I was very adamant that I would build this team over a period of time and I remember coming in going this will take five years minimum, and it kind of has," she said.

"We've picked people that will build the team that bring in specific skills and skill sets to sort of get a broad and interesting team."

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The group of senior doctors at the LGH were all selected based - in part - on the individual skills each brought, ensuring the ED was prepared for the widest range of emergency scenarios.

The Group includes ED deputy director Dr Fiona Carolyn who has experience in strategic planning, Dr Nick Scott who has a background in retrieval and trauma, which included patient transport and attending emergency scenarios outside of the hospital, and paediatric emergency specialist Dr Jess McDonald.

Another FACEM at the ED, Dr Jess Timmings from Canada had a focus on major incident planning, which Dr Reed says was invaluable for the hospital.

"It supports the back end of the COVID work, but there's also big projects to be done in building our capacity to manage a major incident, you know, a plane comes down over the way or a bus crash or whatever," she said.

"They don't happen very often but our preparedness is improved. "We're prepared for everything."

The bolstering of senior doctors has also seen the LGH re-accredited as a training provider which would allow the hospital to hire and develop more junior doctors.

"We lost our accreditation for training with our colleagues with the College of Emergency Medicine back in 2018 and that was because we didn't have enough senior doctors to supervise the juniors," Dr Reed said.

"Now we have that critical mass, we have our accreditation back. "That's a big thing, It's a big thing because now we can recruit registrars - they're our next level down training doctors and we can offer them an accredited training program.

"Dr Kenu did her fellowship exam here and passed and we've had three or four others pass their exams with us in that timeframe as well."

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Much of the FACEMs time at the LGH ED is spent training and mentoring new and young doctors. A role Dr Reed said one of the department's newest FACEMs, Dr Kenu Naider, has excelled at.

While the ED is always busy, Dr Naider said she saw her role as one where she was able to support and coach younger doctors.

"When they see patients, they present the cases to us and then we come up with a plan on how to manage the patient appropriately according to the presentation," she said.

"If the patient needs an admission, we refer appropriately to the inpatient teams, so that's a typical day.

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"Of course, once in a while, we get all the resuscitation cases where we've got accident cases, people who are unwell, critically unwell and we have to resuscitate them to a point where they're stable enough to go to ICU as an intensive care or they go to the theatre for an operation."

Dr Reed said with demand at the ED growing she would like to expand the number of senior doctors at the hospital in the coming years by another four.

"We'll probably jump up in the next couple of years to 16 I should think," she said.

"There are lots of FACEMs around needing jobs."

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