Tsunami: Australian nurses reach out.

The tsunami disaster in Southeast Asia was two days old when emergency nurse Liz Cloughessy got a call from the NSW counter disaster unit asking if she would join a combined surgical and emergency team to Banda Aceh.

'I didn't hesitate, of course. They wanted me to find three or four operating room nurses and another emergency nurse, which I did--there were phone calls into the night right up until about midnight, but by 8am the next morning we had a team together.'

The nationally coordinated 28-person team flew out the following morning, and was one of the first civilian teams into Aceh after the disaster.

Ms Cloughessy said the team set up in an abandoned private hospital in Banda Aceh and worked alongside Indonesian teams from Jakarta, providing emergency and surgical care to survivors.

'Our role was very much to work with these teams and support them--we went in and tried to clean up the ward area, provided help with dressing techniques, and to get a system happening so that once patients had gone to theatre and had their wounds debrided, we were able to bring them back into a clean, or cleaner, environment.'

'We looked at a lot of infection control issues--we had an infection control expert with us, who was just invaluable, as well as public health people--so we all …