Building relationships along a bumpy road

WORKING with low-acuity patients allows Tasmania’s Non Emergency Patient Transport Services team to offer emotional as well as physical support.

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WORKING with low-acuity patients allows Tasmania’s Non Emergency Patient Transport Services team to offer emotional as well as physical support.

RFDS Tasmania’s Non Emergency Patient Transport Services (NEPTS) team leader Lisa Lord’s day can consist of anything from ordering supplies and linens, organising vehicle maintenance and arranging rostering to coordinating interhospital transfers and finding herself bouncing along a bumpy road in a NEPT vehicle helping to transport a patient requiring medical care.

It’s a job that is full of interest and variety, and it’s one the previous stay-at-home mum relishes.

“We travel state wide,” Lord says of the service, which has been running for just over 12 months. “We’ve picked a patient up in Hobart and brought them up to Launceston, which is about 200km – so several hours of driving. We don’t have the best roads here in Tasmania. Even our main highway has lots of roadworks and potholes. Our A-roads down here are not like A-roads on the mainland.”

Thankfully for Lord and her team, most of their clients are local patients. NEPTS services low-acuity patients who may require oxygen or a stretcher, or have other medical requirements, to be driven from hospital to hospital, nursing home to specialist appointment.

The team also provides the road leg for a Tasmanian flying to or from Melbourne for a specialist appointment. And it’s Lord’s role to ensure that everything on the ground is in place to ensure a smooth transition from the air to the road for the patients they are transporting.

“If a Tasmanian needs to go to Melbourne for a specialist appointment, whoever is organising it, they would contact our flight coordinator in Essendon who would then contact me and say, ‘There’s a patient needing to be moved from here to this airport, the plane’s available, this is the ETA of the plane, can you organise to get a crew there?’ If they’re returning from Melbourne, I organise the coordination of the transfer from the airport to the ongoing destination,” she says.

In addition to its medical services, NEPTS also offers private bookings when required, helping to ensure loved ones don’t miss out on cherished family moments.

“If someone wants their grandmother to come to their wedding but can’t use a private vehicle, then they can contact me directly to provide a quote and do the booking,” says Lord.

As well as the variety of her role, for Lord, much of her job satisfaction comes from the people she meets and the relationships she forges along those bumpy Tasmanian roads.

“Not all of our patients are sick but it’s just knowing you’re helping somebody, whether it be a smile and a nice, smooth trip or the best you can do in a stretcher vehicle,” she says. “Some of our older patients live in a nursing home but require transport to specialist appointments and such – you develop that rapport. You’re that familiar face for them. If they’re worried about a clinic they’re going to attend or after an appointment if it didn’t go exactly the way they had hoped, having that familiar face, someone you’ve already developed a relationship with can be quite comforting.

“With palliative patients, helping them be transferred to the smaller community hospitals so they can die in their own community. That’s a bit sad but at least you know you’re helping fulfil their wish of dying at home.”

Originally published as Building relationships along a bumpy road