Tim Leeuwenburg – What Basics/Sandpiper are doing in Oz

Tim chats us through what it is like to be a rural doctor in Australia

Top 3 Points from this podcast:

• Know your local teams.  Train with them, support them and practice sim scenarios.
• Know your equipment.  The Sandpiper clinician is really there to perform a limited suite of meaningful interventions (do the basics, well).  Making sure you know where your equipment is packed and how to use it is vital
• Be an advocate for change, whether at local level, State or Nationally.  Harness the good news stories from patient outcomes to help generate awareness, support and funding for Sandpiper Australia

Resources:

Kangaroo island doctor blogging about rural medicine in Australia 

https://kidocs.org/ 

SANDPIPER AUSTRALIA 

sandpiperaustralia.org 

ACRRM PHEC 

https://www.acrrm.org.au/courses/face-to-face/pre-hospital-emergency-care-phec 

About Tim:

Tim Leeuwenburg is a Rural Generalist on Kangaroo Island, South Australia – he started off as an ED/ICU trainee in Adelaide before realising the heady mix of medicine that an RG encompasses.  For the past twenty years he’s been in probate practice on Kangaroo Island, providing primary care, emergency medicine and anesthetic services through clinic and hospital, as well as prehospital care of SA’s Rural Emergency Responder Network (RERN)

 Now semi-retired, he and partner Trish spend time rehabilitating orphaned wildlife and sea kayaking; Tim still collects pocket money working as a retrieval consultant for the Central Australian Retrieval Service and doing the odd anesthetic locum.  More importantly he now has time to help out as Chair of Sandpiper Australia in the hope that we can overcome the ’tyranny of distance’ by establishing rural responder networks across the various States & Territories in Australia.

twitter @kangaroobeach