Olivia Peaper’s story highlights risk in centralising services

Olivia Peaper almost didn’t make it through her first month of life.

Olivia Peaper, 17 months, with her parents, Tim and Samantha, and sisters Chloe, left, and Paige at their home at Frenchs Forest, northern Sydney. Picture: John Feder

Like other 17-month-olds, Olivia Peaper loves to listen to Baby Shark and totter around in her big sisters’ shoes. However, she almost didn’t make it through her first month of life.

When she couldn’t stop crying as a newborn, her GP prescribed reflux medication.

At 10 days, her mum, Samantha, noticed her skin was grey and her nappies dry, so she took her to hospital.

Olivia had late-onset group B strep, a life-threatening streptococcal infection, which was raging through her tiny body.

Her lungs could not function properly and were filling up with fluid.

Her mother took her first to nearby Manly hospital, on Sydney’s northern beaches. From there she was rushed to the Sydney Children’s Hospital at Randwick. When other treatment options failed, doctors had no option but to perform a delicate surgical procedure — they inserted cannulas in her neck and connected her to an extracorporeal membrane oxygenation machine to bypass her heart and lungs.

Olivia was too ill to be taken to theatre, so the team worked on her in the intensive care unit. It required the help of the hospital’s only cardiac surgeon, Peter Grant.

Ms Peaper says it is “scary” that other children like Olivia might not have access to the same lifesaving treatment if cardiac surgery at Randwick is threatened.

Some doctors, at the Children’s Hospital at Westmead, in Sydney’s west, believe cardiac surgery should be concentrated at their hospital. However, Ms Peaper says her daughter might not have made it to Westmead.

“I don’t know if she would have survived another transfer,” she says.

Olivia remained in the Randwick intensive care unit for 30 days then spent another two weeks on the children’s ward, before she could be returned to a local hospital.

Each night her father, Tim, a naval clearance diver, returned home to Frenchs Forest, in Sydney’s north, to be with Olivia’s older sisters, now three and five, and ferried them to daycare, then drove back to Randwick to be at the hospital.

Mr Peaper says driving further to Westmead would have made the commute even more difficult.

“Sydney is such a big place and the distance between those two hospitals is phenomenal,” he says. “If you centralise the services, there are a lot of people who are going to be disadvantaged.”