My Warm Table ... with Sonia

Reflections of a real Flying Doctor with Dr Kieran Hennelly

September 13, 2022 Sonia Nolan Season 1 Episode 20
My Warm Table ... with Sonia
Reflections of a real Flying Doctor with Dr Kieran Hennelly
My Warm Table ... with Sonia +
Become a My Warm Table supporter and help us continue creating great WA content!
Starting at $3/month
Support
Show Notes Transcript

As a young boy growing up in Manchester UK, Dr Kieran Hennelly watched the sunkissed, exotic, adventures of the Australian flying doctors on TV. 

He never imagined that would be his life and vocation, living and working in the WA Kimberley and saving many lives while leading the medical crews and operations of the Royal Flying Doctor Service (RFDS)WA. 

Kieran shares his journey of finding his place in the world among rugged terrains, breathtaking landscapes and heart stopping emergencies. 

 
Duration: 37 minutes.

Links:
Royal Flying Doctor Service 

Want to join the conversation on this week’s episode?  

Facebook  LinkedIn  Instagram 

 

Listen, subscribe, rate and review:

Apple Podcast  Spotify  Amazon Music or your preferred platform.

Podcast website: https://mywarmtablewithsonia.buzzsprout.com/

Please share this podcast with your friends and take a moment to rate and review. 

 

Thank you!

·      Sincere thanks to Jay (Justin) Hill for his expert sound mastering and patience! Jay, together with the incredible Eva Chye, have inspired me through their passion project If Innovation Could Talk – a YouTube vlog also promoted through LinkedIn. If you have your own ideas for a podcast or video, feel free to reach out to them through the LinkedIn page.

·      Thank you to all my generous guests for their time in sharing their expertise and experiences around My Warm Table.

Music: ‘Sweet Soweto’ by Cast Of Characters. Copyright licence for use via soundstripe.com 

Support the show


Please rate and review this podcast - it helps to share the love with others!
You can also follow My Warm Table on social media and join the conversation:
Facebook Instagram LinkedIn
Catch up on all episodes. You'll find My Warm Table on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Buzzsprout and more ...

My Warm Table, translated into Italian is Tavola Calda. These were the words my Papa used to describe a table of good friends, good food and good conversation. I always aim to create a tavola calda in my life and I hope this podcast encourages you to do so too!

Sonia Nolan:

The Royal Flying Doctor Service is an iconic much loved and our most trusted Australian charity. The Flying Doctor operates in the most remote corners of our vast country, and certainly here in Western Australia, we couldn't do without it. Today around my warm table, you're going to meet a real Flying Doctor, a friend and former colleague of mine from a few years ago when I had the privilege of working for wh RFDS. I have a tremendous admiration for the doctors, pilots and nurses that work for this vital Regional Health Service. But before I introduce you to our Flying Doctor, I want to share some stats and information about the service that you may not realise. And I certainly didn't know until I worked there. In WA The Flying Doctor is an essential service because our state is the world's largest and most remote health jurisdiction, covering 2.5 million square kilometres of sparsely populated and harsh terrain. And did you know that the RFDS has five strategically positioned arrow medical bases throughout WA and that it has 16 PAC 12 aircraft, three jets, and now two helicopters, which are all fitted out like emergency hospital units in the sky. They're incredible. If you ever get a look inside one. It's important to know that the RFDS doesn't just swoop in to save people in emergencies. But it also brings GP clinics, the dentist, the pharmacy, and dedicated highly skilled professionals to patients in the most remote places when they need it the most. And if you think the Flying Doctor is only for our regional friends, then think again because the moment you leave the metro area and travel around our beautiful state, you're in flying Dr. Country, and you too might need their service. In fact, last year in WA alone, the Flying Doctor flew 9 million kilometres, conducted 16,000 landings and retrieved more than 10,000 patients, as well as answering more than 50,000 consultation calls and trading another 10,000 patients at their primary health GP clinics in remote wa leading these medical teams is the insightful and very wise Dr. Kieran Hennelly. And it's my privilege to have him as our guests around my warm table. today. He's going to share with us his journey to becoming a Flying Doctor and his deep connection with and all of our rugged Australian outback. I'm Sonia Nolan, and you're on my warm table. Welcome, Kieran. It's so lovely to see you again.

Dr Kieran Hennelly:

Thank you very much. Thank you for inviting me.

Sonia Nolan:

Oh, it's just such a pleasure. I'm since I started my warm table podcast. I've wanted to engage yourself and certainly the story of the RFDS. So I'm really excited that you can make time to be with us today. I'm delighted to be here, here. And I'd like to start with going back into your time in England because you're not Australian, you're not Western Australian. Gosh, you've seen probably a lot more of Western Australia than most people have. Tell us the road to coming here and your early days in England.

Dr Kieran Hennelly:

Okay, so that's a pretty circuitous journey. Yeah, born in the UK, born in Manchester, but of Irish parents. So my parents moved over from the west coast of Ireland, probably in the 1950s. I'm the youngest of five. And I was born quite a long time ago now. In Manchester. I grew up there when school there, went to college in London, worked as a hospital doctor for about eight years, then moved to New Zealand became, after a number of years became a New Zealand citizen. That's sort of Securitas ly how I ended up here I was settling into life as a I guess you'd say a rural general practitioner in the South Island of New Zealand in a ski town sounds quite picturesque town called Wanaka. which some of you Yeah, it is a postcard. Yeah, it's kind of ridiculously beautiful.

Sonia Nolan:

That's a good way to describe a lot of the people felt

Dr Kieran Hennelly:

I kind of needed my head examining when I suggested I was I was going to leave that and go and work in the Kimberley.

Sonia Nolan:

The rugged Kimberley Yeah, oh my goodness.

Dr Kieran Hennelly:

But I was I needed something I needed checking upside. I had an opportunity and I took it and it was a real punt. Actually, I didn't know how it was going to turn out at all signed on for 12 months and that was 11 years ago.

Sonia Nolan:

It's obviously worked out. I want to go back a step though Kieran because you did mention to me once that medicine wasn't necessarily going to be your path you hadn't intended to be a doctor.

Dr Kieran Hennelly:

No, I hadn't. Fortunate didn't really know what I wanted to do. And I was kind of reasonably bookish as a child. And I actually ended up getting a place to do philosophy, politics and economic Thanks. So I had a scholarship into one of the universities in the UK. And I can still remember very clearly just being a bit concerned about the direction it was taking me in. And this is gonna sound kind of insufferably intellectual. But I remember having a conversation when I was having my interview for university to do philosophy. And they were asking me kind of questions about what I thought was relevant in philosophy. And I was talking about action, and being present in the world and doing things and I think from an early age, I had a strong sense that I wanted to leave the world changed. I was unafraid of kind of jumping in much more afraid of being a passive observer on the sidelines, got thinking about that, once I've got my place to do philosophy and thought, well, you know, maybe I should actually walk the walk. So it was a fairly late conversion to medicine. But it was that desire, which I think actually a lot of people have young in their younger lives to do something concrete to make the world a better place. And I thought, well, let's give it a crack. I actually never thought I would stay in medicine. But 30 years later, I'm still here. It's still here,

Sonia Nolan:

but you've done so many different things within that. What kind of medicine what's what specialty Did you did you specialise in,

Dr Kieran Hennelly:

I've been a bit of a bit of a wandering soul on that one. But I started as a surgeon, so I was qualified in 1992, in London, and I did basic surgical training. So I got my fellowship at the Royal College of Surgeons in the UK in 1987. And I was then going on, that's just really an entry level exam for higher surgical training. did another couple of years after that doing cardiothoracic surgery,

Sonia Nolan:

cardiothoracic, for the uninitiated is heart and lungs. Yes, yes.

Dr Kieran Hennelly:

Yeah. So open heart surgery, basically. But I, you know, it was it was a complex decision about whether or not to stay. But I think in the end, there were other things I wanted to do with my life, I did love the surgery, I loved the immediacy and the importance of the role. But again, I have a memory of being on a ward round one day and staring out the window at the rest of the world. And my peers were tended to be very focused. And that was really that, you know, they'd had that as their goal really, for all of their adult lives. And I sort of made a decision which I still miss surgery, I do not, I don't miss the fact that hadn't spent the last 30 years of my life in the same hospital, which is still a bit of a vocation, that stuff and I have nothing but respect and admiration and regard for my, for my peers who did stay in that world. And I've always got a soft spot for surgeons, which a lot of people find them, you know, a little bit of sometimes challenging in some of their behaviours, but I'll always have love and regard for practice of surgery.

Sonia Nolan:

Look, I think I remember you saying to me one evening here, and as we were working, that you need to be a special type of person to be a surgeon because you're actually cutting somebody open. So you actually have to have complete confidence and faith in your abilities. And there's, there's a special type of person that can do that.

Dr Kieran Hennelly:

Yeah, I believe that very strongly. It's not easy. It's not for the faint hearted. No, no. And it challenges your sense of self belief. And it is a very strong leadership role. I mean, I remember very clearly, because I did, you know, seven or eight years of it, although I was only at a junior trainee level, I can very clearly remember being in theatre, doing operations and having the whole of the operating theatre staring at me, thinking what's he going to do now? If things were not, you know, necessarily going as you would want them to? Or the other time of the surgery was extending? You've got to be tough.

Sonia Nolan:

Yeah, well, look, all of that surely was great training for then working for the Royal Flying Doctor Service because of the emergencies and the situations that you find yourself in day to day. Yeah, it was.

Dr Kieran Hennelly:

What I haven't said is there were other aspects to that training. So a lot of surgeons do a lot of Emergency Medicine work. There's a big overlap there. So I did about probably if you added it up altogether, probably about three and a half years in emergency. I've did some critical care works. I worked in intensive care unit, and did a couple of years of working on the high dependency unit with cardiothoracic patients after they had heart surgery. As part of cardiac surgery, you get the heart to stop, we call the patient down to 32 degrees, and then you have to start them up again. So they're pretty sick when they come out of surgery. So I got quite comfortable working in environments where people were very unwell, and you had to act decisively, and with the best information that you have in front of you, so I learned a lot in that time in my life. I then moved away from that little bit by actually going into rural general practice.

Sonia Nolan:

Was that in New Zealand

Dr Kieran Hennelly:

Yeah. So I never did general practice in the UK moved to New Zealand. sort of had a year or two of picking up some casual work. And I mean, that was an epiphany for me was getting to New Zealand, getting into the outdoors, I'd been very much urban creature up until that point, and skiing all the time and bushwalking, hiking, kayaking, scuba diving, all of that sort of stuff, which is very easy and accessible. In New Zealand, it's almost compulsory, really, it is controlled. And I just picked up casual work to sort of fund me through that time. And that's how I ended up in Wanaka, which is a ski town I did a ski season there as a doctor. And that turned into nine years of living and doing rural general practice, which I didn't think I would enjoy as much as I did. What I loved about it was the people we dealt a lot with high country, sheep, farmers, outdoorsy people, mountaineers, rock climbers, guides, it's a rural farming community, and they're just great people. I've always liked people who are engaged with their environment and sort of informed by by living and working in our landscape. You know, just something about that works well, with the type of people that I respond to.

Sonia Nolan:

There's nothing more grounded and more landscape and picturesque than the Kimberley. But just before we go there, Kieran, you said you were a ski doctor for a while. Does that mean lots of broken limbs? Like what are what are the main things that present to you as a ski dog? Yeah,

Dr Kieran Hennelly:

so I never worked up the hill. Some of my peers actually went in and worked on the ski field. I worked in town, but we would get everyone come down. So you know, a big day and in one occur. I mean, there's only 5000 People live in one occur as sort of resident population, but you could get for 4000 people up one of the ski fields and there's three ski fields around there. So you get a lot of quite unwell people and it's all broken wrists, dislocated shoulders, broken legs, knee injuries, head injuries, lots of people banged up and stuff. So yeah,

Sonia Nolan:

are the novice skiers I remember being in one occasion we arrived in the evening and set set up our campervan. We did the campervan thing with the kids, and didn't appreciate the beauty of the place until we woke up in the morning and there was just like, oh my goodness, we would wait to arrive. And it really was it was just stunning. The next morning I was just breathtaking. Absolutely breathtaking. And yes, you're lucky that I wasn't one of those people that presented to you because skiing is not my forte.

Dr Kieran Hennelly:

I was kind of enthusiastic but bad skiing. And I think myself a few times as well. Touchwood never had any really horrendous injuries.

Sonia Nolan:

From what occurred, you went to the Kimberley?

Dr Kieran Hennelly:

Pretty much yeah, there were again, there was a bit of locum work in the middle it took about, I think from memory, it took about nine months to get all of my permissions and credentialing organised to come and work in Australia. There's often a lag for overseas trained doctors for that can come

Sonia Nolan:

What attracted you to RFDS Were you one of those little kids in the UK watching the RFDS series on television and thinking you were one of those?

Dr Kieran Hennelly:

Still remember it? Yeah, very clearly it was difficult to describe really, to Australians how impossibly exotic Australia seemed when you were growing up in quite a cold grey, rainy Manchester and we'd get this glimpse of of this kind of technical a world where all tanned and gorgeous. And white teeth.

Sonia Nolan:

Oh, yes, that's us. Yeah.

Dr Kieran Hennelly:

Just things like surfing and some of the aspects of you know, I think that that kind of beach life and again, a life for a lot of Australians, which is very tied up with the ocean and the coast is, you know, it seems amazingly exotic to to someone from the UK. Yeah, absolutely watched the Flying Doctor series, the original one, I should say for

Sonia Nolan:

the new ones a bit risky. I've I've only watched one. No, you shouldn't. I know, I do believe it's quite risky. But you know, I think it's does a really good representation of what does actually happen. probably much more exciting, much more exciting than your normal time in the aircraft yet. So, watching that as a child, Could you ever imagine that that would be you?

Dr Kieran Hennelly:

Not really No, I never had a very good sense when I was young of what the future might look like. I do remember thinking what I would be like in the year 2000. You know, far away that did did and all of a sudden it's it's in the past. You know, it's it's very strange how that happens. But one thing I did know was that I was restless and curious, and I probably have my family and my siblings to thank for that in the sense that they were all older than me. All of the ones University before I did and they'd started that exploration of the world. So I lived that vicariously through them and just couldn't wait. I was desperate, desperate to, to get into it and get stuck in. And as it turns out, I'm probably the widest travelled and the most restless of my family actually,

Sonia Nolan:

I the most tanned.

Dr Kieran Hennelly:

That's thanks. That's a very low bar. Yeah, I think I might be. You might be you might be. I've got fair hair than the rest of them. And I probably do go a slightly deeper shade of pink than the guy guy than the rest of them for your listeners. They may not know but I am a redhead. Yeah,

Sonia Nolan:

that's right. That was it was actually a low blow. Hearing it was a pretty low blow. That must have been such a shock to you landing in the Kimberley to work in confined places in some of the most remote hard to reach regions. No aircon? No, no mod cons. Tell me what those first first few months were like,

Dr Kieran Hennelly:

Yeah, I can remember, I had the vaguest idea of where Derby was or what it might be when I agreed to go there for a year. And I think I've looked it up on Google Earth. And, you know, you couldn't really tell that much, but landed there. first of November 2011. Remember that very clearly. And it was extraordinary. You know, it's just a blast of heat and just such an, a different environment, just vast expanses of of nothing. I mean, for any of your listeners that have had flooding up from Perth to the Kimberley, you fly over the great sandy desert. And that's just kind of dunes undulating away into the, into the horizon for seemingly forever. And it felt amazingly and massively remote. And there's about a 35k drive into Derby from the airport that you then used to land out which is curtain and there were dingoes on the road. And it was just this blazing heat. And this bush kind of it was like a see the bush there, you know, it's it's like you're in a boat in the middle of a green ocean Derby town, which I love and will always have great regard for but it's it's not the prettiest town on the planet. I think even it's, it's, it's champions would admit that. So it was a bit of a culture shock. I can imagine first night, got invited out onto the marsh. They were having a an arrival party for me and a departure party for a couple of the pilots who were leaving. We had we may have had a flyover from one of our aircraft. And the marsh is just, you know, kilometres of, of bakes dry mud and sun was going down. It was yeah, it was pleasingly exotic. Yeah, it was great. Special. Yeah, it was that's been my thing is seeing different things and seeing stuff and getting experiences that I'm endlessly curious about how people sort of fit their lives together and make sense of their lifestyles. I was always you know, every time I used to take a long distance plane flight, I'd be looking out of the window wondering what the people who are flying overhead, you know, what, what the shape of their lives were and who they were and how they made sense of all the good and the bad in their lives. And that's, that's a pleasure for me that never goes away.

Sonia Nolan:

That's harking back to your days of, you know, philosophy. And you know, clearly that's something that's very much within you.

Dr Kieran Hennelly:

I like people I've been adopted for 30 years now. And it's a great and a very rewarding profession. But like any profession, it becomes familiar and say me, the thing that keeps me energised with medicine is the people really that you meet. And, as I say the the unlikely and unusual circumstances in which they find themselves and it's always been an honour and a pleasure to be allowed to reach out to people in those circumstances. It's great.

Sonia Nolan:

Can you tell us some of the stories of living in the Kimberley and being one of the senior doctors for the Royal Flying Doctor Service in the Kimberley? What sort of situations Did you find yourself in the

Dr Kieran Hennelly:

days are quite long, it's usually a 12 hour shift but you you work from home, you will get a phone call. And that can be from a remote area nursing poster can be from a hospital, it can be from someone with an unwell person or it can be from the person themselves, and they'll describe the problem to you, you'll make a determination of what's going on where they need to go to how urgently they need to get there. And then you you sort of wrap all of that up and send it back to our Operation Centre and then if so required. You will jump on an aircraft and go and grab them. We Use a fixed wing aircraft, there's a pilot, there's always a nurse and about 70% of the time there's a doctor on board as well.

Sonia Nolan:

And with the nurses, something that's really special about Flying Doctor nurses is that they're all trained midwives, aren't they,

Dr Kieran Hennelly:

until very recently, it was a prerequisite. We did relax that a little bit during COVID As a business continuity piece, and also to look at more flexible models of working, it's true to say that the vast majority of them currently would still be midwives. And we do say we they do deliver quite a lot of babies and assist a lot of women who are labouring or have antenatal issues.

Sonia Nolan:

And one of the reasons that the RFDS is so important in WA is because of the way that the hospital is structured. Our main hospitals are here in Perth, and the regional hospitals need people to be coming down to Perth, or you or you've got those serious retrievals where they need to go to the trauma centre. So you know, 2.5 million kilometres of upstate, the world's largest health jurisdiction, and a few planes being the ambulance in the sky to make sure that this the people stay safe.

Dr Kieran Hennelly:

Yeah, less than a million population in that 2.5 million square kilometres out outside of Metro, you really spread out. Yeah. And the Kimberley I think when I got there, I realised on my first day of work is about the same size as the British Isles. That was my patch for being on call. But there's there's probably only about 40,000 people in the Kimberley. But extraordinarily high unmet health needs, particularly in the indigenous population, but not exclusively, you know, there's plenty of non Indigenous people living and working remotely who struggle to access health care. So it's it's a non trivial challenge to deliver health care. And I think part of that solution which the government and the people of Western Australia have to find for themselves, is assisted with, with the Flying Doctors. And if we do anything, I think it's we helped to stitch it all together a little bit. There absolutely are first rate hospitals and clinics and healthcare and a lot of very hard working, very determined, and very well intentioned people working and delivering health care every day in extremely remote areas. But the truth is that most of our tertiary specialities are concentrated in Perth, and there are things that you can do in person that you can't do anywhere else in WA. So, of course, we facilitate that

Sonia Nolan:

in in a really extraordinary way, history going back of the RFDS, you know, over 90 years, you know, coming up to 100 years in not too long, and just filling that need in a very vast country.

Dr Kieran Hennelly:

Yeah, I'm a fan of John Flynn, who is our founder who's $20 night? Yes, yes, yes, yes. I'm fascinated by who he is. I think he's a really interesting character, and that he thought of an idea in that sort of post war period, early 1920s, and late 19 teens, if that's the thing, which it'd be an audacious idea or someone came up with it now, back then I just think it's extraordinary to, to even think that you might be able to do something like that.

Sonia Nolan:

Put a doctor and a plan to put a doctor on a camel at one point. There's something there's some great photos, I remember seeing the drop down a camel, but he probably got there firstly by plane but either way, he was incredibly innovative at the time, this idea about getting medical care to the most remote areas of Australia and it was actually underpinned by a it was called an experiment, and it was underpinned by some money from the guy who developed the Hills Hoist. I did not know the guy, but yet really fascinating history to do that with

Dr Kieran Hennelly:

technology like aircraft, which has really only been around for just over a decade, advances in wireless telephony and communications, I guess, is what would call it now huge different than medicine. There's just a brilliantly audacious idea. If I'm ever feeling kind of unsure about the decisions I'm making or sort of not terribly confident about whether or not we can achieve and I just think back to that, and unlike whatever we do now is it's orders of magnitude less than the watch on friends want to do,

Sonia Nolan:

and the courage and the vision that was needed in those days. Yeah, that's so true.

Dr Kieran Hennelly:

And I think I might be slightly romanticising it but I suspect that that was a large part of the development of Australia as a country and that ability to forge into remote and challenging areas and create new kinds of endeavours. Really?

Sonia Nolan:

Yeah. Well, I mean, it gives you that that safety, that sort of peace of mind that you've got medical care when you need it, and especially for families going into the regions of a phone call away literally, you know,

Dr Kieran Hennelly:

if you talk to the pastoralists in the cattle stations, they're often our biggest champions and they will say that, even though they may have never actually needed to pick up the phone and use us The fact that we exist is a source of great comfort to them.

Sonia Nolan:

So Kieran, take us back again. So we were talking about your early days in the Kimberley. And can you can you tell us about any particular memories that really stand out any particular retrievals, or just memories of you being this adventurous, curious spirit in a very different place from from where you grew up in Manchester,

Dr Kieran Hennelly:

I used to live right next to the marsh in Derby. And you could actually drive out onto the marsh, and the airport's also next to the marsh. And it's about 12 kms away from where I was living. So if we got a call, I could actually just nip out onto the marsh. And you could just drive across this trackless expanse of marsh with a big rooster tail of dust behind you heading into the airport, knowing that you'd be jumping on an aircraft, and it's just great, really. And then every day, there will be something amazing to look out. Out of the aircraft window, there is a lot of boredom in the aircraft, it's that kind of mixture of bored boredom and terror sometimes, but you spent a long time either getting to the patient where you, you know, need to do certain things in terms of preparing for the patient and certain amount of work to do. But there are moments where you can just look out the window and you see this extraordinary territory, you see the most amazing sunrises and sunsets, and you get to see things that nobody else does, really, you'd be listening to the radio at night. And sometimes you could sort of follow the radio chatter, and there'd be a few kind of commercial aircraft going above you at 35,000 feet, but you were really the only thing in the air for hundreds of kilometres. And in the wet season, you'd be in and out through the thunderstorms and things so there'd be firing off kind of on the horizon. You know, a great pleasure of mine was to just watch the thunderstorms and you know, if it was quiet, a little bit of music on my headphones and just stare in wonder and admiration at what nature could deliver. It's nature's very present there and nature's in charge really, you just nip into and around things and, and hope that you don't get noticed by the big forces that you see at work in nature. It was it's, it's fantastic.

Sonia Nolan:

Any other memories that you can share with us

Dr Kieran Hennelly:

night shifts are a strange one, because they are, they can be really confronting you do a lot of night work and very tired. Obviously, flying off into the night, when you don't know what you're going to can be really frightening can be quite a lonely job compared to a lot of medical jobs because there's really only you and the nerves, you can get some very unwell people and you have to be capable of dealing with pretty much anything that's thrown at you, which is not the case these days in hospitals that can be really confronting, but I can remember one time we got a call from a ranger who was at one of the stations at the Mongols inland National Park. And it was middle of night it was dark, dark, dark, and then just as sun started coming up, we came in over the bangles. And wow, there was a kind of kerosene flare pathway for us set out the sun coming up over over there. And we're all you know, we were tired, but it just really lifted our spirits and sensational beauty, the majesty of it all Yeah, and the isolation. We landed and pick the chap up and he was okay and toggled on home and went to bed.

Sonia Nolan:

One thing I which really struck me many years ago when we were chatting, here, and as you talked about how it's such a pressured environment, sometimes in the plane when you're when you're dealing with an emergency case, and you've got to go into you know, fight or flight mode pretty quickly and save a life like literally save a life, you know, some very intense situations that you find yourself in. And I asked you once, how do you cope with that after you finished your shift? And like surely the adrenaline's pumping, and you're still going and I remember you talked to me about the cyclical nature of you know, sort of the story, reaching a natural conclusion while you're on shift. Do you remember that conversation?

Dr Kieran Hennelly:

I thought you were going to say red wine?

Sonia Nolan:

No, I don't know, maybe that's the natural conclusion at the end of the day.

Dr Kieran Hennelly:

Now, do you remember saying that and I think there's some truth to it. There's a little narrative arc each day. Yeah, I think that that's really quite helpful. Because it's a story would have been a beginning, a middle and an end. If I compare what we do in RFDS. With say, the life of a general practitioner, you know, a GP might see 2030 people possibly even more in a day, most of them aren't particularly unwell, but there'll be a cohort of those who are extremely unwell and it may not be immediately apparent, juggling lots of different patients with lots of different reasons for coming to see a doctor all sorts of test results, referrals it's a much more or diverse and sometimes confusing environment, there's a cleanness to, to the RFDS work, big day at RFDS. We'll be dealing with, say, eight to 10 flight referrals or consultations and then flying four or five patients that would be, you know, that would be a big, big day at work, Kimberly, for anywhere really? Yeah. I guess the rhythm of the job is set by the constraints of of the model of care delivery, certainly, the aviation necessarily puts certain lag into how you deliver services during the day.

Sonia Nolan:

And then that just the retrievals is what you're talking about here. So I mean, I think a lot of people have that impression that the RFDS just swoops in and takes you away. And sometimes it does. But the reality is that it's such a diverse service with things like the GP clinics and the dental, you know, work and the remote regional work that, you know, is so diverse. It's not just the swooping in. And and when you do get on the plane, you really need to be on that plane. Yeah,

Dr Kieran Hennelly:

yeah, you don't tend to go just in case or just for the sake of it, you know, because there are operational constraints, if you're on the aircraft, and you're not available somewhere else in the organisation, there's weight constraints, there's fuel constraints, there's time constraints to putting some on an aircraft. So

Sonia Nolan:

the pilots go through all of that really quickly, don't they? The other extraordinary part of it is, you know, obviously, the medical practitioners, but the pilots, they go through all of the weather checks go through all the fuel, they're going to need the weight that is important in a constrained

Dr Kieran Hennelly:

time, and you're very consequential decisions flying at night, as I say, through the wet season, sometimes into they have a phrase, which is a black hole landing. So an airstrip, which doesn't have any lights around it, it may have some LED lights, which are solar activated, we sometimes use kerosene flares. And you can see when they're flying in those, all you can see is a few lights, and there's no reference points or anything like that. It's it's a really challenging type of flying that they do. And if they get their decision making wrong either in deciding when to go Who or what the weather's doing, or in whether or not they can land at a particular strip, you know, that's, that has consequences. Either way, if you do go, it has consequences. If you don't go it has consequences. I do remember having a not a disagreement, but a discussion with a pilot one night about some a patient and I wanted to go and grab from a remote community. And I found myself saying, well, it's only a great one cyclone, so we'll be right. Not unreasonably suggested that we just wait a little

Sonia Nolan:

bit. And I think it's a pilot that gets to make the call, isn't it? Yeah, that's really important. Because they know, you know, they're in charge of the aircraft and they get to make the call. Yeah, there

Dr Kieran Hennelly:

are. Sadly, they're the masters of the aircraft, although they're not the doctors. Well, everyone in that aircraft thinks that they're the most important person there. So it can become a little bit of a dysfunctional family, a little bit of Scotland going on, but it's usually a reasonably good natured

Sonia Nolan:

look. And I think that you know, everyone in that aircraft is is of the highest calibre, that was certainly my recollection of everybody. They're just incredible professionals working for the RFDS,

Dr Kieran Hennelly:

no they're a good bunch

Sonia Nolan:

Kieran you've tasted so many flavours of life and humanity in so many different parts of the world. And I just wonder whether there's some philosophical truth that you've come to about humanity, diving back into your understanding and love of philosophy, but also your curiosity and your understanding of humanity, because you've seen them in their most vulnerable times. Yeah. What's the truth that you've found for yourself?

Dr Kieran Hennelly:

It's great question. Err on the side of niceness, I think err on the side of being prepared to make a bit of an idiot of yourself. And sometimes if you if you default, to, to trust, you'll get it wrong sometimes, but I think the consequences of that are less than, than defaulting to suspicion, which is a natural imperative, you know, for for a lot of us. And one thing I do strongly believe that I certainly think I've got lots of things wrong in my life. But one thing I've got, right, I think, quite a lot of the time was keep my mouth shut, and and let people tell you what they think of the world. And you'd be surprised. Yeah, there's lots of wisdom out there in unexpected places as well. That's the gold when you find wisdom in places you don't anticipate it.

Sonia Nolan:

Here you are in Perth, Western Australia now many years later, and having lived an adventurous life of curiosity, and contribution, which seems to be the two words that describe you so well Kieran that you've really given so much to Western Australia through your generous approach to medicine and your expertise that you've given to the Kimberley and the adventure that you've enjoyed along the way.

Dr Kieran Hennelly:

I'd say I've had back more than I've received quite serious about this. But by orders of magnitude reading, if you have a curiosity about them, I think people are very generous at explaining who they are and how they see the world. And I think that's a great privilege and without wishing to get too deep into the weeds with philosophy, but I believe there are lessons, I believe that there is purpose and I believe those voices are sometimes quite quiet. So it does you well to, to quiet your own inner voice. Sometimes I don't think it's random.

Sonia Nolan:

Well, that means that meeting you here and some years ago, when we worked together was not random. It was an absolute delight to reconnect again today and have you on my podcast. So thank you for saying yes to come and share my warm table.

Dr Kieran Hennelly:

Thank you again. And it's been a pleasure.

Sonia Nolan:

You've been listening to my warm table with Sonia Nolan, in Italian a tavola calda is a warm and welcoming table where you can share big ideas, friendship, laughter and life. So much happens around the kitchen table, and I wanted to amplify it here in this podcast. My aim is to feed your mind and soul through smart conversations with heart. No topic is off limits, but good table manners rule. I hope you'll join us each week as we set the table for my extraordinary guests who will let you feast on a deep knowledge in life experiences and wise insights. Let's keep the conversation flowing. Please subscribe to the my warm table podcast and share it with your friends and networks. Perhaps if they're new to podcasting, take a moment to show them how to download and subscribe so they don't miss an episode either. I'd also love you to join our community on Facebook. You find the group at my warm table podcast. Your support is very much appreciated. So that together we can eat, think and be merry