Tip:
Highlight text to annotate it
X
I'm Lieutenant Tracey Cannard.
And I'm a nurse in the Royal Australian Navy.
I'm currently down here at HMAS Cerberus in the medical
school teaching baby medics as a senior instructor and
divisional officer.
And I'm Lieutenant Amy York.
And I'm currently posted to a perioperative nurse billet in
the PCRF, so the medical deployment team.
And I'm down here at HMAS Cerberus working at the
hospital whilst I'm not deployed.
The previous deployments I've done have all been
humanitarian aid.
If you actually deploy over to Afghanistan or Iraq, one of
those, then you're actually providing health care to
defence personnel and native people of those
countries if needed.
I've always been a nurse.
When I left school, I've never wanted to do anything else.
And I've always wanted to be a nurse in the military.
It's a love that's never left me.
So when I had the opportunity I did such.
And I've never looked back and never regretted it, never.
I'm the same.
I've always wanted to be a nurse.
And it wasn't until once I'd actually finished my nursing
training that I decided yeah I really did want to join the
defence force and definitely the Navy.
I love the lifestyle.
Just being able to post every couple of years.
Doing something a little bit different.
And just meeting new people every couple of years.
You rotate through.
And it becomes very family orientated.
And that's what I really like, the whole family atmosphere of
the defence.
I've really enjoyed where I've been posted as a wife, and now
as a military person.
And you meet up with people years down the track that you
haven't seen for so many years.
And you meet with them again and it's like you pick up
where you left off.
It's great like that.
I just love what I do.
And it's so different, as a nurse, I can recruiting, I can
do teaching, I can work on PCRF, I can
work down at hospital.
And then you can work at a branch as
well, if you want to.
So they're quite versatile, aren't we?
Yeah, very diverse.
You have to come in with an open mind, but you also are
taught a lot of different skills that you wouldn't have
if you just nursed in a hospital.
Although I'm a theatre nurse by trade, I'm trained to do a
resuc, work in a resuscitation team, do triage, primary
health care, teach, manage, all these different things
that I wouldn't have if I was just a nurse in a hospital.
We do anything and everything when we're needed to.
The challenges that the job offers you are not the usual
challenges that you find.
The honour that you feel when you do those special things,
like ANZAC and that, where you're representing not only
yourself, but other people who have been
in the defence force.
So I suppose those kind of things are my big things.
Yeah, absolutely.
There's a whole different attitude.
If you said to a surgeon in a civilian hospital, we don't
have that instrument, a lot of them would
get upset or cranky.
You say that to a surgeon who's deployed and he's just,
OK, what else can I use?
We've all got a different attitude.
We don't have everything that we may need, but we adapt our
practise and use what we can.
And everyone got this motivation
to get the job done.
Life on board the ship as a nurse is busy depending on
what your operational deployment is.
It can be a bit monotonous.
Sometimes you're just waiting, waiting for things to happen.
But then something will happen and you're flat out for the
next few days.
You got to be ready to go at a moment's notice.
And especially since you're only
person is medical support.
You're on call 24 hours a day.
So you don't close up shop at the end of your working day.
It just happens all the time.
And you do get sailors that come to you with the issues
and problems at some ungodly hour of the day.
Because they finish at odd hours as well.
So then you have to be on call for them.
And works busy.
Work is very busy.
But it's good fun.
It is.