Monash reaches out
October 2005
Report: Robyn Anns
The Boxing Day tsunami and the devastating Nias earthquake that followed affected hundreds of thousands of people. The Monash University community reacted quickly, providing financial and humanitarian assistance.
About three months after the tsunami devastated communities across Indonesia , that country's health authorities asked Dr George Somers to help a struggling provincial hospital in the town of Jantho.
Dr Somers, a research fellow in the Department of General Practice, originally arrived in Aceh in February as a medical volunteer and, while there, identified problems with the Western non-government organisations' responses to the primary care needs of tsunami victims.
His reaction, when he returned to Melbourne, was to recruit Australian volunteer doctors and nurses and coordinate their relief efforts.
When he went back to Aceh in April, health authorities asked him to help at Jantho's hospital.
"When I first went to Jantho, I found the hospital staff were operating an outpatient clinic for just two hours a day," he says. "There was no radiography, the pharmacy was inadequate and pathology was unreliable. The nurses could only work a couple of hours a day and there were no functional inpatient beds."
So Dr Somers and two other Australian medical volunteers developed the Jantho Project, which aimed to bring the hospital up to Western standards and make it capable of being used as an auxiliary medical and nursing teaching facility.
"From May to July, about 30 Australian medical and nursing volunteers each spent two to four weeks supporting the services of the hospital. During this time, they saw it develop into a hospital that is up and running with inpatient beds and medical and surgical facilities," Dr Somers says.
"It now has an operating theatre, reliable radiology, pathology and a better stocked and run pharmacy department."
Professor Khalid Kadir, from the School of Medicine and Health Sciences at Monash University Malaysia, collected medicine and surgical supplies from friends, colleagues, pharmacies, drug companies and the pharmacy department of the teaching hospital attached to the Universiti Kebangsaan Malaysia, and delivered them to Aceh.
Monash University wound care expert Ms Jan Rice arrived in Banda Aceh three months after the tsunami to give nursing lectures to surgical ward staff.
When an earthquake struck Nias, an island off the western coast of Sumatra, on 29 March, she was immediately deployed to the small island.
The hands-on assistance of Monash staff is being complemented by valuable research.
Associate Professor Brett Inder, head of the Department of Econometrics and Business Statistics, and econometrics PhD researcher and World Vision volunteer Mr Brett Parris have established a research project to examine child protection policies in Asia.
Earlier this year, they conducted a preliminary evaluation of the existing child protection measures in Sri Lanka and India.
"We chose those countries because they have well-established child protection policies. They have a yardstick and a cultural understanding -- a base line from which to start -- of child protection," Dr Inder says.
"In the latest disaster, lost and orphaned children were registered with authorities, child-friendly spaces were established as refuges for them and temporary schools were set up, but many children remained displaced for some time," he says.
"Later this year, we will interview child protection workers in India and Sri Lanka to evaluate the effectiveness of their policies and look at ways they could be improved."
Emeritus Professor Paul Grundy from the Department of Civil Engineering believes improving the humanitarian response to natural disasters such as tsunamis is only part of the answer. He sees a pressing need for a corresponding effort in disaster reduction, using engineering know-how coupled with community input, to reduce the impact of future disasters.
Professor Grundy and colleagues went some way toward this at a conference in New Delhi in February where they helped review the disaster risks of Indian Ocean coastal communities.
"Tropical cyclones, floods, earthquakes and other cataclysmic events kill many more people, and destroy far more livelihoods, than tsunamis," he says.
Medical or nursing educators interested in volunteering for the Jantho Project should contact Dr Somers at george.somers@med.monash.edu.au.
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