Bali bombing victims to the first AIDS patient in WA, Dr Julie McMorrow has seen it all in her 40 years at RPH

Julie McMorrow has seen a lot in her 40 years as an intensive care pharmacist at WA’s busiest hospital. She has helped provide life-saving medication for victims of devastating terror attacks and natural disasters, helped to treat WA’s first AIDS patient in extreme secrecy, and has even been there to see a Nobel Prize winner at work. Celebrating her four decades providing medicine to the State’s most sick and vulnerable at Royal Perth Hospital, Dr McMorrow recalled one moment that stood out was when she received the call that some of the Bali bombings victims were on the way in 2002. “On the Sunday morning after the bombings happened, I was down in the pharmacy dispensary, I’d come down from the wards and I heard somebody from the burns unit say ‘there are patients involved in this awful bombing in Bali and we’re going to be getting them’,” she said. “So I finished my work as quickly as possible for the day and then stayed on, and stated contacting people in critical areas around the hospital, to say ‘what medicines do you want in place’. “Then I went around with a big trolley full of medicines . . . and two security guards and we stocked up everything so there were appropriate amounts of stock for the patients who were arriving. Dr McMorrow also remembered her time as a junior ward pharmacist working with a “very tired looking but wonderful” medical registrar. That was Barry Marshall, who at the time was testing Helicobacter cultures on himself, research work that led to a Nobel Prize. “The research was deemed so experimental that they couldn’t use patients for it, so he swallowed the cultures himself to prove that this bacteria, or this organism, was causing gastric ulcers in patients because it was in their stomachs,” she said. “He worked with Robin Warren who was the pathologist at Royal Perth, and years later they won the Nobel Prize for it. We were in total awe of what Barry was doing, that he was game enough to swallow these cultures.” In 2004, Dr McMorrow was on call when she got a call following the Boxing Day tsunami, asking how many life-saving drugs she could package up to leave to Thailand within days. “We were the pharmacy tsunami team, and we packed little kits for each team member (who was travelling to the ground) to be able to use for personal needs or when they were out in the field with patients.” And in 1983, Dr McMorrow was called in to help WA’s first AIDS patient. “I got called into the chief pharmacist’s office to say ‘you’re covering ICU, we have the first AIDS patient with us, he’s been admitted overnight, and we’ve worked out a system where you can review his charts without going into the room’,” she said. “So the doctors would dart into the room wearing their all their gowns and masks and everything, the nurses were rostered to a couple of hours each, and the nurses would hold up the medication charts to the glass window to the isolation room and I’d review the charts through the glass. “Nobody knew what caused AIDS. They had an idea at that stage, it was a virus, but HIV hadn’t been properly identified at that stage. And there was such a stigma in the community that there was no way we’d ever let on we were looking after the AIDS patient in Royal Perth because people would be worried about anybody who went to Royal Perth. The stigma was awful. That didn’t actually get dispelled until much later.” Dr McMorrow said one of her proudest moments was devising a basic protocol for bloodless anaemia management with medicines in under an hour during a critical anaemia emergency in ICU in 1999. With the help of specialists in this area, she went on to develop guidelines which are still being used at RPH, throughout Australia and even overseas.