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INTERVIEWER
Barbara O'Brien
Monte Jones
RECORDED
10 February 2018
TRANSCRIPTION
Simone Taylor
TRANSCRIPT
Full Transcript
IMAGES
Pictures Catalogue
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Ken Archer talks about his work as the Chief Hospital Scientist in the Dubbo Base Hospital Pathology Department.
Transcript Excerpt
[0:17:39] (I): So that leads up us into Orana Pathology [Service].
(S): Yes, so we could also see that moving around that the small hospitals, basically had no service and that up until we - now that we had these semi-automated instruments, Jeff and I could see that we could deliver a set of - a service to those hospitals because we could now do things very much quicker. We could do all our liver functions, enzymes and that. Do the whole lot within 2 hours so we had it all out before lunch.
So we had a series of meetings with the Board [of Dubbo Base Hospital] and [CEO] Brian Semmler [OAM]. The board of the hospital in those days - all hospitals had a board and I really think that one of backwards steps was to get rid of Boards. I guess the bureaucrats liked that but for example in Dubbo we had Allen McKinney who was a pharmacist at Narromine, Bob Scarff who was a journalist for the [Daily] Liberal in Dubbo, Brian....I've lost it. Brian Stewart who was a Baptist Minister and Chaplain for the hospital and Ron Rich who was an accountant for the hospital and there was others of course, there was an Aboriginal member - lady and they changed. But they were always in the hospital, they had committees and they moved about in the hospital, they come into the lab and talked to us and that sort of thing. They had the community at heart and so when we talked to them, and Brian about setting up this Orana Pathology Service as a separate entity within the hospital. As a standalone entity as opposed to the Department of Pathology which was like the Department of Radiology. They came on board for that and they were quite keen.
[0:20:00] So to do that we, first of all had to set up a series of couriers, all the locals emanated from Dubbo and they left Dubbo and they came back to Dubbo at the end of the day which wasn't really much use to us. So we looked at the XPT rail coaches which came down from Cobar, Bourke, Brewarrina, Walgett, on a daily basis and bought people down to meet the XPT at the Dubbo Railway station and in those days, communities were a community and there wasn't any of this Work Health and Safety nonsense that your carrying blood and infectious blood in your bus. But they brought it down and we went picked up it by lunchtime at the rail station and we could turn that around and have results the same day.
Also the laundry service became regional so instead of having all little people - little household washing machines- the linen was all coming centrally to Dubbo. To offset the jobs that were lost, the couriers were sourced from those towns and so they would leave Cobar and Walgett, Bourke etc., come down through all little hospitals on the way. They’d leave at say 8 o'clock in the morning and down by lunchtime, and the nurses were always very practical and good in those areas so they had no problem collecting the blood for the samples. We would send them up tubes and just show them what needed to be done for - different blood [tests] went into different tubes of course. They had to be mixed and after a time we put in little centrifuges so they could centrifuge the blood for chemistry. Because if it stays on the cells for too long the red cells will chew up the sugar in the blood or glucose so you get a false [low] glucose when you do the test in Dubbo and the red cells can leach things such as one of the cardiac enzymes HBPH and also potassium into the serum so you get a falsely high potassium which is dangerous because even if it is ‘normal’ it could mean that the patient was actually very low. So we taught them to centrifuge, suck off the blood with pipettes. There’s gels now that obviate that step but in those days we had a lot of to and fro with the nurses and there was no computer interface and so forth, so it was always on the phone talking and going around and visiting them. Jeff and I and Brian Semmler and Jack Thompson the Laundry Manager probably once a month went around all those towns just with regard to those sorts of things.
[0:23:16] (I): So how did the results get back to the hospitals?
(S): That was another issue that we had to address. It was one thing to have the results ready by about lunchtime but it become tedious to be ringing them through. You needed to make sure that the nurse recorded them in a place where the doctor on change of shift would come and get the results. So Jeff and I put our heads together and Jeff had been down in the city longer than I had and we looked at fax machines which were pretty primitive then. There was none in the region and it was a Xerox machine which we called the old flap-flap machine which once it – it had rotating drum and once the message had gone through the paper just flapped around until someone pulled it off in a roll. So those hospitals had the first faxes in those towns. I might be wrong but I think they were sometimes used for banks and other businesses sometimes, I'm not sure about that…
[0:24:31] (I): Actually the town I came from (which I won't say) yes the fax was used by everyone, it was quite unique it was the first fax. But the machine spat it out in long, long, long roll and you had to continually cut it up, and yes it was a quite an interesting thing.
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