PIPER-Paediatrics retrieves
critically ill children from hospitals throughout Victoria, Tasmania,
and southern New South Wales for life-saving treatment to the Royal
Children's Hospital and to Monash Medical Centre in Melbourne.
PIPER-Paediatrics operates out of the
Paediatric Intensive Care Unit of the Royal Children's Hospital
Melbourne. PIPER brings the highly specialized, world-class resources of
paediatric intensive care to critically ill children in Victoria and
beyond providing safe, expert, emergency inter-hospital retrieval to a
paediatric intensive care unit.
An equally vital part of PIPER activity
is the provision of specialist advice to doctors, nurses, and ambulance
personnel on the resuscitation of severely ill children.
Staff
PIPER Paediatrics is staffed by the
Paediatric Intensive Care Unit (PICU) of the Royal Children's Hospital
Melbourne. This allows clinical advice and treatment during retrieval to
be given by experienced and highly specialised teams. PICU thus comes
to the child before the child can be moved to the PICU.
Organisation
PIPER Paediatrics leadership team
consists of a medical director and a senior nurse clinician. They are
supported by an administrator. Daily clinical operations are lead by
PIPER Paediatrics Duty Consultants who are senior medical specialists in
paediatric intensive care.
Transport staff
Responsibility for clinical advice and
retrieval operations lies with the Duty PIPER Consultant, supervising
the retrieval teams. All retrievals are performed by a PICU doctor and a
PETS nurse or by a PICU doctor and a paramedic. Medical staff are
either experienced registrars (>4 years training in paediatrics,
intensive care, anaesthesia or emergency medicine) with extra training
in retrieval medicine or, in some highly complex retrievals such as
transport on extracorporeal life-support (ECMO), they are senior ICU
specialists from the RCH PICU.
PIPER nurses are very experienced nursing
staff with a strong background in looking after critically ill children
as well as in retrieval nursing. They have undertaken a 1-year
post-graduate specialist course in PICU nursing, attended a PIPER
Workshop, Air Ambulance Orientation, and completed a Competency Package.
Many nurses have also completed the Introduction to Aeromedical
Retrieval Course through Monash University and the Advanced Paediatric
Life Support (APLS) Course.
PETS history
Victoria has an area of 227,600 square km
(87,884 square miles, roughly the size of the United Kingdom) and a
population of 5.4 million, of whom 4 million live in greater Melbourne.
1.2 million of the 5 million are children (<17 years). Victorian PETS
covers all of Victoria, southern New South Wales and northern Tasmania.
The total population of this area is about 6 million (approx. 1.5
million children), living within 600 km of the base of operations. On
occasion, PETS may also retrieve children from other paediatric ICUs in
Australia for treatment available only at the RCH Melbourne.
Tertiary paediatric services in Victoria
are located at the Royal Children's Hospital (RCH) and at Monash Medical
Centre (MMC), both in Melbourne. Large general hospitals are located in
regional cities and in central and suburban Melbourne. Many of these
have paediatric departments and paediatric wards, with senior and junior
paediatric medical staff, but not tertiary paediatric services. Smaller
towns around the state usually lack specialist paediatric facilities;
hospitals in these towns are staffed by general practitioners.
A paediatric emergency transport service,
based at the Paediatric Intensive Care Unit of the Royal Children's
Hospital, Melbourne, subsequently began operations in 1979, retrieving
46 patients in that year. In 2011, PETS received over 1000 phone
referrals and retrieved more than 450 critically ill children.