The humanitarian organisation Médecins Sans Frontières has launched a telehealth service in Australia to care for people on Nauru.
It comes after the group, also known as Doctors Without Borders was ordered off the island in October, ending its service for refugees and Nauruans.
On Thursday, it started a free service involving physchological consultations with doctors in Australia via video or phone.
Dr Christine Rufener, a clinical psychologist with Médecins Sans Frontières, says since October, health conditions have deteriorated in Nauru.
She told Mackenzie Smith that her former patients have faced long waits for treatment and an increase in distress and self-harm attempts.
The Nibok refugee settlement, Nauru.
Photo: Pool / NZ Herald / Jason Oxenham
Transcript
Christine Rufener: Given that our requests to collaborate further with the government have gone unanswered, our only option was to look into providing a tele health service. So it took some time to look into the best way to do it. And so we're starting with our former patients to allow for continuity of care and to understand how their situations have developed over the last four months. So we've hired a team of psychologists in Australia who have experienced providing telehealth and will be meeting with our patients over the coming weeks to assess their status where they are now and see how we can continue to support them reduce the suffering that we know they're experiencing.
Mackenzie Smith: So you have presumably stayed in touch with some of these former patients?
CR: We had set up a sort of a hotline when we left because we wanted that we didn't get a chance to inform our patients face to face because we needed to stop our services within 24 hours. So we set up a line for our patients that contact us to ask us any questions we didn't provide ongoing character that line but at least our patients could find out from us what had happened. So we continue to hear from our patients less than less in the last couple months, they knew we weren't necessarily able to help them. So we're especially pleased right now to reach out to our former patients and say, Yes, we are able to help you again.
MS: Are you hoping to expand this to new patients on Nauru?
CR: We're very concerned about the the mental health condition of all the asylum seekers and refugees on Nauru. So certainly, we're starting with our former patients while we establish our new program and establish our new psychologists and we hope to be able to help all of those trapped by this policy.
MS: You've informed narrows government about this, what was the response? I mean, do they want you providing the service?
CR: We haven't received the response, we have informed the Minister of Health.
MS: Do you expect much pushback on this because obviously you were ordered to leave the island but then you're still providing services from afar.
CR: Yeah, the reason we were given for the cessation of our memorandum of understanding and immediate departure was that the mental health needs were being met by the services on the island. As we left, we were able to aggregate our data and collect and put together our experiences to really establish the extreme level of suffering that we witnessed that we documented and then we continued to hear from our patients. We continued to hear messages from the island saying that things are worse that they were unable to access care that they were waiting for three to four weeks between appointments and we just find that unacceptable. We know our former patients are suffering. We made an ethical obligation to support them and so we want to follow through on that obligation.
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