High praise for medics

SMNMED Tina Gelston and LSMED Dennis Egan from Albatross received praise for transferring elderly patients between nursing homes in Nowra recently. Photo by ABPH Neil Richards

A senior hospital administrator has heaped high praise on two HMAS Albatross medics for the work they did transferring more than 20 bedridden elderly residents from one Nowra nursing home to another recently.

“The Navy pair were fantastic and they did a great job,” said Mrs Barbara Schuetrim of the Uniting Care Shoalhaven Ageing and Disability Services.

Mrs Schuetrim was referring to LSMED Dennis Egan and SMNMED Tina Gelston from the Albatross Medical Centre.

Mrs Schuetrim’s organisation asked Navy if it could help transfer 50 residents from the Osborne Nursing Home in Nowra three kilometres to the Chesalon Nursing Home.

This was because work has started on a $12.5 million renovation and expansion of the Osborne Street facility.

“We hope to have the work completed soon, so in the meantime the Osborne residents will be staying at Chesalon,” Mrs Schuetrim said.

She said all patients were confined to bed and some were in their nineties.

“Each needed to be lifted from his or her bed, placed on an ambulance stretcher, driven to Chesalon and placed in a new bed,” she said.

LS Egan and SMN Gelston were supported by a second ambulance from the Nowra Community Hospital.

Over the next four hours the sailors carefully lifted patients into and from their ambulance.

“I suppose they did between 15 and 20 trips,” Mrs Schuetrim told Navy News.

“They were wonderful and very professional,” she said.

“They did their work and quietly went back to their base before we could thank them,” she added.

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