THE horrific experience from some of the world’s major battlefields could one day lead to better emergency care for rural patients injured in remote locations such as farms.
Delegates at next week’s Rural Doctors Association of Queensland (RDAQ) conference from June 8-10 will hear how medical specialists at James Cook University, Townsville and US defence personnel are trialling new treatments to reduce blood loss and shock during the initial, crucial minutes of a patient sustaining major injury.
Doctors call this critical window the “golden hour”. According to the leader of the JCU study, Dr Geoff Dobson, the golden hour is often meaningless when treating patients in many of Australia’s remote locations.
“The vast distances and diversity of climates and terrains place major limitations on pre-hospital trauma care and aeromedical retrieval,” he said. “Time is the killer.”
Dr Dobson’s team and personnel from the US Special Operations Command and US Navy are developing a new ‘ultra-small’ volume drip therapy mixture to treat bleeding, shock and traumatic brain injury sustained in remote locations.
“In 2015, we showed the therapy reduced internal blood loss by 60 per cent over five hours, and increased survival after traumatic brain injury with and without major blood loss and shock,” he said.
Dr Dobson, who holds a Professorial Chair in the College of Medicine and Dentistry at James Cook University, Townsville, has a long standing connection to researchers and injury specialists in North America.
He received his undergraduate science degrees at Monash University and a PhD at the University of BC, Vancouver, Canada before spending eight years in cardiac research at the National Institute of Health.
He is an elected fellow of the American Heart Association, and continues to work with US military doctors on a range of cutting-edge treatments for patients injured in remote areas. Much of the research has been specifically focused on spinal cord trauma and burns.
Dr Dobson’s research philosophy is to tap into hundreds of millions of years of animal adaptations and develop new therapeutics for cardiac surgery, trauma and sepsis.
“This new trauma initiative may assist rural specialist groups and missions of organisations such as CareFlight Australia and the Royal Flying Doctor Service,” he said.
“This is why high quality pre-hospital telemedicine with rapid access to aeromedical transport is paramount to an effective and efficient health care system in remote locations.”
Dr Dobson will present details of his findings during his keynote address to open the RDAQ conference in Townsville.