ACROSS THE NATION & AROUND
Biloela family thanks PCH nurses As if nurses at Perth Children’s Hospital (PCH) hadn’t been through enough in recent times, in June they came face to face with the harrowing, complex and unmet health, mental health, social and emotional needs of a young child who has spent most of her life behind bars. Four year-old Tharnicaa Murugappan was flown to Perth from immigration detention on one of Australia’s most remote and isolated territories, Christmas Island (CI). She’d been held there, with her family, behind razor wire, at the Australian Government’s offshore immigration detention facility, kept away from the local CI community, and their home town of Biloela in Queensland, for the past two years. At least PCH nurses were able to help her celebrate her fourth birthday, the only one since she was born that she has spent outside of a detention centre, in hospital. Apparently, unbeknown to the Australian Government’s Department of Home Affairs, and its enforcement agency Border Force, both responsible for the detention of the Tamil asylum-seeker family, which also includes another child, six year-old child Kopica, Tharnicaa was gravely ill in the island prison, more than 2,500 treacherous kilometres away from the nearest tertiary hospital. What most Australians don’t know about CI and its neighbouring coral atoll, the Cocos (Keeling) Islands (CKI), collectively called the Indian Ocean Territories (IOT), is that like the Australian Capital Territory (ACT), and Northern Territory (NT), as well as the renowned Norfolk Island (NI) off the east coast of the country, it does not have state government, and therefore state services are delivered directly or by contract by the Australian Government. This includes health care.
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western nurse October 2021
The locally managed health authority on CI, and CKI, the Indian Ocean Territories Health Service (IOTHS), staffed mainly by West Australian nurses, is run by the Australian Government Department on Infrastructure, Transport, Regional Development and Communications (DITRDC), and its on-island sub-set IOTA, the Indian Ocean Territories Administration. Despite being based in the most far-flung and treacherous Australian communities on the map, the IOTHS is only equipped to provide primary and short-term acute care, and only has a limited and relatively new partnership arrangement with WA Health. Basically, if you have anything more serious than a common cold, you are medically evacuated off the islands to Darwin or Perth. Maternity services are also not available in the IOT. Another thing most would not know, not even the locals, is that the IOTHS is not allowed to provide health care to those incarcerated in the CI immigration detention centre, or outside of it for that matter, as their lives and conditions, including their health, are governed and managed by the Australian Government’s Departments of Home Affairs and Border Force, way outside the auspices of even DITRDC, let alone the IOTHS. Imagine what managing peoples’ health in full quarantine facilities, let alone full immigration detention facilities, managed by these monolithic agencies in the IOT, would look like? It’s not pretty. The multi-billion dollar facility on CI is a white elephant, and certainly not an option for COVID quarantine. It’s not viable and it’s not safe, the main reason being it’s at least 2,605 kilometres away from the nearest Australian tertiary health services. When the facility is full, or even fuller than its most recent two adult and two child residents, the Feds bring in medical contractors, for example IHMS (International Health and Medical Services), to deliver health services inside. No wonder it cost more than $90 million to imprison the Tamil family there.
