Aputula Clinic

The Aputula Clinic is a small modern building and health clinic, which currently has
one white nurse and one Anangu health worker working.

History

The first clinic at Aputula was built in the seventies and run by the Australian Inland mission. There used to be two European staff here then, white nurses, who used to run the clinic. There was also one Aboriginal Health worker, Johnny Briscoe, who is now at Titjikala.

After the Australian Inland Mission left, Johnny Briscoe took over running the clinic and it moved into its second building, the 'Margaret Bain Hospital'. At that time all the staff were Aboriginal health workers and were working under the guidance of Johnny Briscoe. .

After Johhny Briscoe left, Pauline Allen and Sonia Churchill, who was the senior health worker took over running the clinic. The community then employed another European nurse to work at the clinic and help the health workers who needed sometimes to be away from the community, for cultural reasons. Over the years, many nurses have come and gone. The clinic moved to the new building, where it is now, in year 2001.

Daily Life

The clinic is a busy place, especially in the morning, and treats everybody in the community for all kinds of medical needs. Clinic workers carryout tests for blood pressure, sugar levels and weight levels and dispense treatments for sores, cuts, chest problems and chronic diseases. .

The clinic also looks after the medication needs of everybody in the community. It is a big job as there are many health issues in Aputula community, as there are in all of the Aboriginal communities around Australia.

The most common health problems in the community are Nutrition, Obesity, Diabetes type II, Renal disease, Infant Malnutrition, Hypertension (High blood pressure), Hypercholestoralaemiea (Too much cholesterol in the blood).

Not only do people suffer from one or two of these disease, but often people are suffering from a combination of multiple chronic diseases.

Sometimes people are kept in for observation through the day to check for high or low blood pressure and other complications. Often babies are really sick and if they lose a lot of weight and fluid, they are kept at the clinic for observation.

When problems are really serious, community patients are evacuated by air on the Royal Flying Doctors Service aeroplane to Alice Springs Hospital. .

The clinic also covers antenatal care, and post natal care. When the time comes, mothers travel to Mt Gillen Hostel in Alice Springs (two weeks before) to have their babies.

Funding for the clinic is from the government through the Dept of Health and is administered through a community controlled grant.

Funding

Surviving on the available funding is difficult because there are lots of issues involved in working in a remote clinic, and not all of the extra expenses required are covered by the funding received. In Aputula Clinic there is no Clinic vehicle and there is no funding to get patients home from hospital treatments once they get back to the highway 150 km away.

People in the community have not very much money and quite often have no way to get themselves home. These means that nearly every time, people decline to go for their hospital treatments because they can't get home.

People need to go for specialist treatments, x-rays, ultrasounds, specialists appointments, medical surgical appointments. These things are not available in the community. The health workers have to make sure these things happen somehow and this puts enormous stress on the other budget areas in the clinic.

Workers in the clinic are also overburdened and there is a shortage of workers in the community. There is supposed to be a Commonwealth fund to employ Anangu health workers but it has never come to fruition as of yet for Aputula clinic. This is probably due to a lack of adequate administration support in the community offices.

There are people who want to be trained to become Anangu Health Workers but literacy levels are also a real barrier and there are currently no adult literacy programs in the community.

There is no funding at all for dental work in the community. People have to find there own way into Alice Springs to be treated.

ANANGU HEALTH WORKER