Public Sports Medicine Clinic Kicking Goals
Cairns Hospital doctors are kicking goals at the first dedicated sports medicine clinic in a Queensland public hospital.
Since early March, more than 350 patients have been seen by specialist doctors at the hospital’s innovative musculoskeletal injury clinic.
The clinic focuses on treating patients’ acute musculoskeletal (soft tissue) injuries, such as ankle sprains, shoulder dislocations and stress fractures.
The clinic was established in mid-March by staff specialist Dr Kira James, who is also a team doctor for the Australian Swim Team (The Dolphins), with the assistance of the hospital’s junior orthopaedic doctors.
Cairns Hospital sports and exercise medicine registrar, Dr Dougal Middleton, said the clinic – which currently operates one day a week – was proving to be a major success story for the hospital.
‘It’s about picking the right patients,’ Dr Middleton said.
‘We focus on non-operative management of musculo-skeletal injuries, getting great cohesion between orthopaedics and sports medicine.
‘This is what happens in the private world, but it just doesn’t happen in the public sector – until now.
Dr Middleton was recently awarded the most outstanding research project at the Australasian College of Sport and Exercise Physician’s (ACSEP) conference in Wellington, NZ for his study into the new Cairns Hospital clinic. He said most patients were not athletes.
‘The most common presentations to our clinic are patients with knee and ankle injuries, and chronic arthritis,’ he said
‘Surprisingly, more than 70 per cent of our patients are classified as living in remote or very remote parts of the Far North.
‘And this is the beauty of our clinic: we can treat everyone from 50-year-olds with knee pain who like going on hikes on the weekend; through to a competitive cyclist with a back injury from a crash.’
Dr Tamika Ponton, a third year orthopaedic/sports medicine resident at Cairns Hospital, has been involved with the clinic since its inception.
Dr Ponton, a Noongar woman from the south-west corner of Western Australia, who was awarded an ACSEP indigenous scholarship to attend the conference in New Zealand, said it was a major achievement being able to provide care to people in the Far North’s far-flung corners, either in-person or via telehealth.
‘What we’ve been able to do is reach people who aren’t able to afford or access private health care,’ she said.
‘They are still getting the care that would be offered through a private setting, but in a public hospital.
‘It doesn’t matter if you live in Cairns or on a remote island in the Torres Strait: you are getting a musculo-skeletal specialist looking after you, whereas if you are living in another part of Australia you would need to access these services privately.’