The job of a lifetime

Despite spending six years working as a primary care nurse for the Royal Flying Doctor Service in Far North Queensland, Dianne Paul is actually a born and bred Victorian.

“I was born a dairy farmer's daughter in Kerang,” says Dianne. “I came to Melbourne when I was 11 because my father had died and my mother remarried in 1960.”

While Dianne completed her schooling in the city, trained in paediatrics at the Royal Children’s Hospital and worked across a number of hospitals in newborn intensive care, she always harboured a desire to get back out into the countryside and work with remote communities.

“Growing up in the country, I know for a fact that health care for people in the bush is not as available and health outcomes are not as good. To me, education is everything in health.”

It felt like fate, then, when in 2009, Dianne noticed a job posting for a primary care nurse in child and family health based up in Queensland’s far north communities.

“I saw the job in The Age and waved it in front of my husband and said, ‘I'd love to do this!’” says Dianne. “I've always wanted to do remote and Outback work, but life got in the way. You know, you get married, you have children, you have commitments. So when he said, ‘Well, you should go for it then’, I nearly fell over! I said, ‘Are you serious?’ He said, ‘Yeah, of course’. So that’s what I did.”

With her application swiftly approved, Dianne and her husband, Roger, boarded a plane and made their way to their new home in Mt Isa.

“It was the first time RFDS Queensland had employed fully qualified maternal and child health nurses,” says Dianne. “They'd been using primary health care nurses who were registered nurses, midwives, most of them. Some of them had done child health, but [RFDS Queensland] had got some extra federal funding to increase their maternal and family health, so they decided to employ people with a lot of experience in child and family health in the community.”

Dianne’s new role saw her working with indigenous parents and families within the local communities, with a focus on health education and driving health promotion activities. “My role was also to mentor the indigenous health workers, so that they could gain more confidence in running the child health clinic on their own,” says Dianne. “We were there supervising and helping with more complex cases.”

For the first two years of her tenure, Dianne was based in Mt Isa, serving the Far North West gulf area. From 2011, however, she operated as a fly in-fly out relieving nurse based in Melbourne, heading up to Cairns and Mt Isa to work in clinics in the Gulf and the Cape. Her last flight up to Cairns took place at the end of 2014.

While Dianne achieved a lot in her time with RFDS, she is perhaps most proud of the playgroup she founded.

“I started a mums group that was called Mums and Bubs. I was talking with the senior indigenous health worker and my health worker, and said, ‘Group work is valuable for increasing skills and for observing children's development and dealing with parents’ anxieties’, and the chief worker said, ‘Oh, don't just talk about it. Everyone just talks about it. Just do it’.

“We met once a week. [The mothers] wanted to learn more cooking and they wanted to have activities, so we had a combination of a playgroup for the children and lessons on cooking a nutritious meal that could feed the whole family each. We kept it fairly simple but it was always tasty. I learned a lot too.

“I think the loveliest thing we did was for NAIDOC Day, when we got a huge piece of unbleached Calico, and the mothers designed a NAIDOC Day banner that said ‘Mums and Bubs’. And they had the idea to put their child’s hands down on there and trace around it. And then they painted the hands and then they put their hand above it. And they told me that that was protecting, you know their protective hand above their child's tiny hand.”

Dianne’s time in Queensland was certainly not without its challenges, and she notes that one of the biggest issues facing those communities is a lack of continuity of care.

“I think you’ve got to be there for a lifetime. They used to say, ‘People just come and go, and we just get to know them and they go’. I felt terribly guilty as a result when I left, because I thought, yeah I’m part of the problem. I went up there because this is something that I wanted to experience, I thought I had something to give, but if I’m really honest, it was something I wanted to do, not in an altruistic way, but I always wanted this opportunity. I can’t even really articulate why.

“I really loved it, but I also think I didn’t scratch the surface in that short time. I think people were also wary of making relationship with you because they’re expecting you to go. They’ve not ever had the same nurse come in, they got whoever was rostered on so there was no continuing relationship with the child health. So at least this way they knew they were seeing me each time. And many of them, when I went back relieving, were very pleased to see me.”

Despite these challenges, Dianne always felt proud to be a part of the Flying Doctor team.

“You felt respected in the street, like your chest was out because you were RFDS.”

After six years serving the communities of Far North Queensland, Dianne and Roger returned home to Melbourne. These days, Dianne has nothing but fond memories of her time working with the Royal Flying Doctor Service.

“It’s the best job I ever had the opportunity to do. I haven’t enjoyed another job as much since. It completely reenergised by passion for family health. Getting a group started and seeing it still going 10 years on is the best memory.”

Because of her time spent with RFDS, and seeing first-hand the critical work that we do across the country, Dianne has decided to leave a gift in her Will to the Flying Doctor. In this way, she feels she can honour her time in the Top End, whilst also helping safeguard the future of what she sees as an iconic Australian organisation.

“When I got to the Mt Isa base, it was such a nurturing place. It was like coming into a new family. Roger and I were never lonely. There was this lovely attitude of looking after one another in the team there, led to some extent by the senior pilot. He was fantastic.

“Quite frankly, I had never met such a skilled and committed group of nurses and doctors in my life. I thought they were all awe-inspiring. I felt part of it as soon as I got there. I felt if you have such awesome staff, it must be an awesome service.”