‘I saw things I never anticipated to see in WA’: Fiona Wood on unique Kimberley healthcare challenges

World-leading plastic surgeon Fiona Wood has praised telehealth as an invaluable tool for treating burn victims in the Kimberley’s most remote areas. Professor Wood gained global recognition for her work with spray-on skin in the wake of the 2002 Bali bombings and was named 2005 Australian of the Year. Delivering a talk at this year’s Kimberley Economic Forum, the surgeon said remoteness in regional Western Australia was a roadblock in burns treatment because immediate action after a burn can change the trajectory of the patient’s healing process. “I saw things I never anticipated to see in Western Australia. I saw unique challenges,” Professor Wood said. “For a future health service in the Kimberley we need to look at it with a lens of what makes the Kimberly unique.” She referred to a moment early in her career when she discovered it would take 24 hours for a Kununurra patient with serious burns to reach life-saving medical treatment in Perth. “I tried to work out how I could impart my knowledge into this space, so that those people who are burnt there didn’t have to suffer any more than they would if they were right down the road from Fiona Stanley (in Perth),” Professor Wood said. “So, we said, ‘Well, why don’t we start to really push our outreach service?’” Professor Woods and her team began a telehealth program to provide immediate and continuous support to those living in regional WA. “We developed an augmented assessment service, so we can look at photographs of the burn and only bring in those that require surgical intervention,” she said. In 2021 alone, the team viewed 1000 images of adults and 5000 of children. This has since had great success in the Kimberley, a region which Professor Wood’s says has the “best treated and supported children across our service”. “(This is) because of a very vibrant and strong linkages between our telehealth service, Aboriginal Health Services and local health services,” she said. Professor Wood is continuing her revolutionary research into burns treatment, working at Fiona Stanley Hospital in Perth.