A Stanwell Park doctor who used his military experience to fight the virus has been added to the COVID-19 Honour Roll and awarded a Medal of the Order of Australia (OAM) for his services to medicine.
“It’s an extraordinary privilege and an honour, but it was completely unexpected,” says Dr Trevor Gardner, an Illawarra Shoalhaven Local Health District anaesthetist and co-chair of Wollongong Hospital’s Covid-19 Taskforce. “It’s the sort of thing that happens to grown-ups, not people like me.”
Trevor is 62 and, when we speak in June, hours away from welcoming his first grandchild. He and his wife moved to the area in 1996 and live in Stanwell Park. He has a son and three daughters – one is a nurse who worked alongside him in the Covid ward in Wollongong. Trevor’s hobbies are hanggliding, sea kayaking and cycling, and he’s happier talking about these than work awards.
Fortunately, the Local Health District broke the media release mould to put out a proud, detailed account of his “stellar and selfless career”, including years with the Australian Defence Force. Trevor was deployed in Rwanda, East Timor, Iraq and Afghanistan. He was part of the aeromedical evacuation response to 2005’s Bali Bombing. In 2012, he went on sabbatical with CareFlight.
Or, in his words, “I’ve just been alive for a long time, so I’ve done some stuff.
“I’m pretty proud of the job I did in Iraq in 2004. There were an extraordinary amount of horrendous injuries all day, every day for a bunch of months in Iraq. You just had to look after the person in front of you … whether they were an American soldier or a Polish soldier or an Iraqi civilian – didn’t matter. I think I contributed to that one, under difficult circumstances, because I was well trained.”
Experience in war zones would prove vital when Covid came and Trevor, along with his colleague, Wombarra surgeon Professor Bruce Ashford, was asked to lead a taskforce at Wollongong Hospital. In the army, you have a mission, then you work to achieve it, he says. “Bruce and I took the same approach to the Covid taskforce. Because hospitals, like all big bureaucracies … they’re very slow to react. When the balloon goes up, it’s not what you need. You need to be a little bit bold, make decisions, back yourself.”
His aim was to “maintain the capability of the hospital”: protect staff, so they could treat patients. Trevor soon realised hospital buildings needed to change. Masks he saw as a failure. “PPE is like when everything else has failed and the enemy’s in the room, you put on your mask. So it occurred to me that we could make an engineering solution.”
His idea was to constrain spaces and control the airflow using practical measures – such as fans and HEPA filters – to blow the virus away. Local glaziers helped, working fast to install windows with holes and louvres, and sliding glass doors.
“Easter 2020 was our first retrofits. We’re pretty happy with the stuff that we did in anger, rapidly.”
Hundreds of those retrofits are still in use today in hospitals across the region, with studies ongoing.
Trevor – who’s never had Covid – led through the worst of times, from March 2020 to October 2021. What got him through it? “Riding my push bike!” he says, laughing.“Bruce and I would do a Royal National Park run or a Darkes Forest run. We’d scheme and plan, nut out all our problems.”
He and Bruce are now looking forward to an annual cycling fundraiser the pair started in aid of Head & Neck Cancer Australia. Ride Beyond Five is a 104.8km loop through the Royal National Park, the escarpment and Sea Cliff Bridge. Save the date and support the good doctors: 26 October 2023.