Medic staff graduates with ACLS certificates in Mine site

Nine medical staff from Morobe Mining’s Wafi-Golpu Project and Hidden Valley mine graduated with a certificate in Advance Cardiac Life Support (ACLS).

Staff that have completed the course are now able to administer drugs, special electric therapy, interpretation of Electro cardio graph (ECG) monitor, and use theLifePak15 machine to identify blockage in the coronary arteries. It was facilitated by health contractor, Hard Hat Health.

“With this training and ongoing support, the MMJV medical staff will be able to stay up there with the world leaders in resuscitation,” said Acting Manager for Health, Safety & Security Brett Corney.

Hidden Valley General Manager Bevan Jones congratulated the participants.

“It provides me with the confidence that should anything go wrong, we have the ability to deal with that on site.We operate a mine in a very remote and isolated area and we have people from all over the world and all over PNG working here with various levels of health concerns and in the last couple of years we’ve improved our capacity to deal with some of these adversities,” he said.

Mr Jones said one way to deal with that was to make sure that there are systems in place to prevent people from getting hurt.

“We’ve got our safety tools. But when somebody gets hurt we need to be able to sustain their lives, so what I saw here was a good example of a professional team working together to make sure that we get a good outcome.”

During the ceremony a practical demonstration of a heart arrest case was performed by the medical staff on how to treat such cases with available resources, most importantly the use of LifePak15.

ACLS is an internationally recognized course and is supported by the Resuscitation Body worldwide under the committee known as the International Liaison Committee. All procedures are regularly reviewed and policies are reviewed every five years.