AMA President A/Prof Brian Owler, Doorstop at Westmead Children’s Hospital in Sydney, 5 November 2014

Transcript: AMA President A/Prof Brian Owler, Doorstop at Westmead Children’s Hospital in Sydney, 6 November 2014

Subject: Ebola and Government funding of a facility in Sierra Leone

I’m pleased today that the Minister for Health and the Prime Minister have made this announcement in funding the Aspen Group to provide the services at the UK-built treatment facility in Sierra Leone. I think there are a number of questions that we still need to have the answers to. We do need to have more idea about the staffing of this facility. Clearly, there are going to be Australians involved in this facility. Now, those Australians need to have – and in fact, all the healthcare workers clearly need to have the appropriate training and resources to make sure that they can do this work both safely and effectively, and anyone working in that treatment facility needs to make sure that their safety comes first. We certainly want any Australian that goes and does this work to be able to be brought home safely.

So once again, the AMA welcomes the announcement. There’s still a lot of work to be done, and the sooner that this operation gets underway, the better. I will be speaking to a number of people at Aspen to talk about the training and resourcing of those people that will be going to West Africa. I think it’s very important that we all have confidence in that.

Any questions?

The other issue to say is that there are other options that should be considered, I think, by the Australian Government. We do actually have quite a number of people that would be able to go and do this work. It is unclear how many Australians will be involved in the treatment facility in West Africa. We know that there are people in the AusMAT teams – that’s the Australian Medical Assistance Teams – that have done work in places like the Philippines who are prepared and ready for deployment and who would volunteer and go and do this work. So there are pre-existing facilities and personnel that we can actually use for treatment in West Africa.

As I say, today we welcome the Government’s announcement in relation to West Africa but I think we need to keep a close eye on the training, the safety of those healthcare workers, make sure it is effective, we’re not putting people in harm’s way, and that we bring everyone home safely. Thank you.

QUESTION: Do you think the Australian Government’s waited too long to announce this decision?

BRIAN OWLER: Look, we welcome the announcement today. Clearly, the AMA’s been asking for involvement in this crisis in West Africa for about six weeks now. I know that people have been waiting on the contingencies to make sure that we manage people with Ebola if they were to become infected, make sure we have contingencies to make sure that they’re either treated in country on the ground in West Africa or can be treated in the UK or somewhere in Europe. It was never about bringing someone 30 hours home back to Australia. It was always about making sure that those volunteers were going to receive the appropriate treatment on the ground in West Africa or have a contingency to get them to somewhere appropriate.

So we’re pleased that those arrangements are now in place and really now it is time to move forward and make sure that we get people into the area and start to get this outbreak of Ebola under control. It is so important that we get as many people as possible into treatment facilities, and this facility will make up part of a global international effort. It is very important in trying to get the transmission rate under control, because unfortunately when people are being turned away from treatment facilities that either don’t have personnel or are full, they go back and they infect other people in their family, in their own homes. And so it’s a really important part of just getting people into a treatment facility in the first place.

QUESTION: People coming back from overseas, will they be quarantined somewhere offshore?

BRIAN OWLER: Look, I don’t think the issue is about people coming back to Australia. We’ve had quite a number of people come back to Australia that have been international healthcare workers providing support on the ground. They have been home, quarantined, they’ve done the right thing. We haven’t had any of those people that have, fortunately, contracted Ebola.

We’ve got to remember that in terms of being infectious, you’re only infectious when you start to show significant symptoms. And so actually having people in home quarantine is actually a very appropriate way of managing this problem, managing the people that come home, and we actually want to make sure that we encourage healthcare workers to actually go and do this work. And that is one of the issues that’s been the case in the US, where the measures that were put in place in New Jersey, in New York, and Illinois actually might discourage people from going and doing this very vital work that we need to do in West Africa.And we’ve got to remember that getting this situation under control at the source is the most important way of dealing with this outbreak of Ebola, and it does mean that all of the issues that we’re talking about in terms of preparedness of Australia remain important, but if we can get the situation under control in its source, then we can actually – that is the best way of protecting the Australian public.