When Andrew Rosengarten and Tara Whelan ran into each other in the corridor at Peninsula Health, it was no ordinary reunion.
The Emergency Department (ED) doctor and Intensive Care nurse, unaware that they were now working for the same health service, had been deployed together to Kandahar, Afghanistan back in 2013.
“I was startled, it was the first time I’d seen Tara since we’d been overseas,” Dr Rosengarten says.
“And I thought he might’ve been here (at Frankston Hospital) for a course or a conference or something,” says Tara. “But he’s been here for 20 years!”
Tara always knew she wanted to be a nurse and follow in her Mum’s footsteps, and Andrew comes from a family of doctors. But neither imagined that they’d serve overseas in a warzone.
“The type of trauma you see in a warzone is very different to what you see here,” Tara says.
Tara was a Lieutenant in the Navy and served in defence for 10 years, including providing humanitarian aid in the Solomon Islands before deployment to Kandahar.
Dr Rosengarten, former Airforce Wing Commander, has also spent time in a military hospital in Iraq, and has been involved in retrieving wounded Australian military personnel who were injured in the Middle East from Landstuhl hospital in Germany, and returning them to Australia.
Being confronted with wounded soldiers from the battlefield was a challenging experience.
“The skill base changes once you’ve actually been into a warzone environment where you have to deal with major trauma – it’s a different form of trauma to what you see in our hospital settings,” he says. “There you have to deal with the patient in front of you, and you’re confronted by limitations, and the need for urgent and immediate care that requires teamwork and prompt resuscitation, surgery, and high level care in intensive care and the wards.”
Despite the challenges, both Andrew and Tara acknowledge that the teamwork and communication, along with the comradery shared in their group of eight, were some of the highlights.
“[You learn] teamwork and communication skills … and stress management, and the resilience in dealing with that situation – doing the best you can with what you’ve got. Those are lessons you can’t really learn elsewhere,” says Tara.
“The skills we learned from our experience in Afghanistan also provide us with a skill base that can help us in the care we provide to patients at Peninsula Health,” adds Dr Rosengarten.
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