ENTREPRENEUR Michael Henderson’s gaze has always been trained north, to our populous near neighbour and a region that also sits in a one of the natural disaster-prone parts of the world.
It’s a focus that has seen the Sandover Pinder executive chair and adjunct professor in the University of Western Australia’s faculty of medicine and dentistry build strong links between Western Australia’s health-care sector and Indonesia.
Inspired and influenced by both his grandfathers’ life-long commitment to public service, much of Professor Henderson’s career has been dedicated to building the profile of WA health services in the Asian region.
His maternal grandfather, George Boucher, was one of the early supporters of Princess Margaret Hospital and St Johns Ambulance and Gilbert Henderson was an oral surgery specialist who set up the maxillofacial department at Royal Perth Hospital.
However, it took the devastating impact of the Indian Ocean tsunami in 2004 and his colleague Bruce Robinson’s battle to get to Indonesia to help the victims that spurred these two friends to set up the International Skills and Training Institute in Health (ISTIH.)
Professor Robinson is a professor in medicine at the University of WA and a doctor at Sir Charles Gairdner Hospital.
The work of Professor Henderson and Professor Robinson for ISTIH was recognised this week when they won the Social Entrepreneur award in the Ernst & Young Entrepreneur of the Year competition, which also put them in the running for the prestigious national awards.
The institute is focused on co-ordinating the aid efforts in the aftermath of a disaster as well as ensuring there are trained personnel, who can quickly respond to the human toll of these unpredictable events.
Building on Professor Henderson’s ties with Indonesia and his strong corporate network in WA as well as Professor Robinson’s first-hand experience of the human toll of the tsunami, ISTIH brought together the intellectual firepower of the University of WA, Curtin University of Technology, the University of Indonesia and the CIPTO Public Hospital in Jakarta.
But Professor Henderson was also focused on how ISTIH could benefit WA and create an opportunity for the state’s universities to work collaboratively.
“It was about bringing together a program that would create a focal point for the state … but at the back end I was looking at how the state government could create a catalyst within government to make the universities come together,” Professor Henderson said.
Money raised through the institute has been used to train Indonesian doctors in WA as well as in Indonesia to ensure they have the skills and knowledge to treat victims of natural disasters within hours of the event.
Getting treatment to victims within the first 12 to 24 hours is critical, and both men recognised they needed a model that would “train the trainers” and ensure local people had the skills to respond before international aid was mobilised.
Professor Henderson said the training programs, along with the ISTIH’s Indonesian Clinical Training and Education Centre, which were modelled on the UWA’s successful Clinical Training and Education Centre or CTEC facility, empowered local people with the skills and resources to treat disaster victims.
“We have set up the training programs so that when there is a tsunami in another part of Indonesia, within a province nearby there will be five people trained by ISTIH and they are there and on the ground,” he said.
“And that has been evident with the Yogyakarta earthquakes, with all the people trained by ISTIH who were in there.
“Because it’s not going to be Australian doctors or American doctors or Canadian doctors who will be at the coal face saving lives in the first 12 to 24 hours … the reality is it needs to be them.”
More recently, ISTIH’s node in Indonesia, based at the CIPTO hospital, has sent emergency teams to treat earthquake victims in Sumatra and Haiti.
However, Professor Henderson said the most powerful role ISTIH could play was in plugging the gaps that inevitably occurred in the multi-faceted response to disasters.
“To me, the real value of ISTIH is we pick up the gap between the planks, we are not a Red Cross, we are not an Asian Development Bank or a World Health Organisation,” he said.
“On the back of the Tsunami in Indonesia, phenomenal amounts of human resources and equipment came in and when the sizzle died down there was a lot of equipment on the ground, some of which hadn’t been commissioned.
“Other equipment had been put into action but a red light had come on and no-one knew how to manage it.
“By partnering and setting up training in bio-medial engineering you can not only manage the commissioned equipment you could commission equipment that was relevant to that area.”
Building ISTIH’s profile was one of Professor Henderson’s key motivations for entering Ernst & Young’s Entrepreneur of the Year competition as he forges ahead with plans to expand the institute’s model to other regions in Asia, including Cambodia.
He said a win on the national stage would smooth the way for ISTIH to negotiate with the big international aid organisations and further refine the quality and scope of health aid it could support.
“There are politics there and stepping above that is something like the Ernst & Young (awards), which enables you to step out of that political minefield,” he said.
