New Australian burns technology allows Halie Tennant to face a brighter future

Camping with a friend, Halie Tennant fell asleep in a camp beside a fading fire. Minutes later, she woke up with her face in the flames.

Halie Tennant. Picture: Aaron Francis

After escaping to the bush for a night of camping with a friend, Halie Tennant fell asleep in a camp chair beside a fading fire. Minutes later, she woke with her face in the flames.

Ms Tennant, 29, was immediately flown from her farm at Hotspur, near Hamilton in regional western Victoria, via emergency helicopter to The Alfred in Melbourne, where she spent two months receiving treatment for deep tissue burns to her face.

A gruelling regimen of dressing changes and cleanings culminated in a full face skin graft, aided by an emerging Australian technology called Biodegradable Temporising Matrix.

The foam-like sheet is used to encourage the regrowth of blood vessels and capillaries after a deep burn or wound, like degloving, where a skin graft is needed to close the skin. It differs from previously used natural therapies that are susceptible to infection and created greater scarring.

“I didn’t know anything for the first eight days because I was in a coma,” Ms Tennant said.

“Then it was coming to terms with what actually happened and trying to fill in blanks because you can’t move forward if you don’t know what happened. I started asking questions because the worst thing you could possibly do is sit there and just think.”

Ms Tennant is the second person in Australia to have had a full facial reconstruction using BTM, with surgeons at The Alfred taking sheets of skin from her back for the graft.

The director of the Victorian Adult Burns Service at The Alfred, Heather Cleland, said the unique use of the healing technology would help burns victims have a better quality of life in terms of pain and socialising.

“The way we present to the world really determines a lot about our quality of life and that consideration is an absolutely vital part of modern burn care,” Dr Cleland said.

“Everything’s gone as well as we could have hoped, certainly compared with what we would normally expect when we’re not using this engineered skin substitute. It’s much better than normal early results. Long-term results, obviously, are to be determined.”

Developed by ASX-listed company PolyNovo’s principal scientist Tim Moore and the Royal Adelaide Hospital’s John Greenwood, the product was trialled for three years in hospitals in Adelaide, Melbourne and Sydney from 2015 to 2018, with follow-up results reported in April.

PolyNovo chief Paul Brennan hopes BTM, which is also being used in the US and more recently the UK, can be developed to be used in hernia repair and breast reconstruction in the future.

“The Harvard Business Review called Australia a dumb country in terms of innovation standards,” he said, “but this product and other medical device products in Australia show Australians are anything but dumb.”

BTM was also a large part of the treatment for victims of the White Island volcano disaster in New Zealand in December 2019.

Two months on, Ms Tennant is home with a new face and outlook on life: “Now it’s just a case of coming to terms with it and more or less developing and forming an acceptance of who I now am.”

The kindergarten teacher was separated from husband Mat for much of her time in hospital because of coronavirus restriction. It is still early days and she will need extra surgeries in coming months, but she has support from more than 10,000 women in the Exotica Tribe Facebook group, where she diarised her story.