Sandi Grieve: Bush nurse a beacon of strength during Walwa bushfires

When faced with a bushfire crisis in January, Sandi Grieve took it on herself to provide a safe place of refuge for the community. Here’s how she was a symbol of strength in the town.

Major role: Walwa Bush Nurse Sandi Grieve, who helped the small town shelter from bushfires last summer. Picture: Fiona Myers

WHEN fire hit the small town of Walwa in Victoria’s Upper Murray last January, emergency apps were not picking up the severity of the blaze because it was over the border in NSW. People had about 15 minutes notice that they were about to face an inferno, then communications were lost.

But those worrying about the town’s fate didn’t bargain on the strength of Walwa Bush Nursing Centre chief executive Sandi Grieve.

With courage, commitment and care, she transformed the medical centre into a shelter for firefighting volunteers, co-ordinating 600 meals for those volunteers and displaced people as the fire tried three times to wipe out the community.

Working for 30 days straight, she made more than 100 welfare visits to locals in the aftermath to make sure all was OK, and reinvented the bush nursing centre into a recovery hub to co-ordinate and distribute goods and services to fire-affected communities.

“Nurses are professional and we also have an intimate knowledge of the community,” said Sandi, originally a city girl who always wanted to be a nurse in a rural community.

She has made an extraordinary impact in the town, as the first endorsed rural and remote nurse practitioner in Victoria, and only the 14th in Australia, giving her the ability to prescribe medicines and refer her patients to specialists.

“As a nurse in Melbourne, we would wave our patients goodbye not knowing what would happen to them or what they were going back to in their houses in terms of support,” she said.

“Here, if someone has a laceration on their leg and they need to keep it elevated, I know that they might have cows to feed, so I will ring around and organise a roster so the cattle will be fed but the patient can have rest.

“It’s the ability to know those patients intimately that allows this, and I know that everyday I go to work, I make a difference in someone’s life.”

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