Ear, Nose and Throat surgeons are now flying into Cherbourg, assistance that isn't yet available in many remote Aboriginal communities. Dr Judith Boswell is managing a pilot to widen that net. It's a pilot project that's designed to run for two years, which provides a visiting service into remote communities, which offers surgery and ear examinations and hearing tests, and an important component of that is also training for local health and education personnel. At the moment we've got five communities where we're focusing our surgery, and those five are spread across the Cape and the Strait basically, so we go to Thursday Island and Weipa, Mornington Island, Doomadgee and Mount Isa for our surgery. Essentially there are a group of people for whom there's no other solution at this late stage.
Surgery is the only answer.
And these are cases in which there is need for a structural repair of the ear drum or of the middle ear itself. And we think, and our early results suggest, that for some people this has been very successful, and we've seen some very good improvements in hearing levels. We could go on doing surgery for a long time yet, because there's a very high prevalence, as I've suggested, of the disease, and of these very late stages of damaged ears. But a very important part of the project is to enhance the primary health care, because if we don't do something about early treatment and early management of the condition, we could go on visiting and providing surgery for a very long time and surgery in and of itself is not going to reduce the prevalence of the condition. So while we're providing that surgery, the other important components of our program are to work with health care workers such as Aboriginal health workers and nurses in the communities, to improve their ability to recognise and diagnose the disease, and to make sure that they're really very familiar with the best treatments that have been recommended, and to apply those as often as possible.