At Mamamia, we want to acknowledge and celebrate the Australian men who are doing good things and trying to make our country a better place. So we came to you with a list of 100 great Aussie men and asked you to decide Mamamia’s 50 Best Blokes. This week, we’re counting down the top ten and announcing who you chose as Mamamia’s Best Bloke tomorrow. But today, we’re thrilled to introduce you to Dr John Greenwood, who came in at number four.
South Australia, the Northern Territory, western New South Wales and western Victoria. A vast catchment encompassing four states, 2.4 million square kilometres and millions of people. Yet there’s just one burns specialist who oversees the lot.
That man is Dr John Greenwood. A finalist for 2016 Australian of the Year, one of the global leaders in his field and a man on the cusp of a life-changing medical breakthrough.
Greenwood was headhunted from Manchester, England, in 2002, to bring his expertise in burns treatment to Royal Adelaide Hospital and, by extension, some the most bushfire prone areas in Australia.
Within a matter of months he established this country’s first mobile burns-assessment team, a unit capable of rapidly responding to an Ash Wednesday-scale blaze. But it wasn’t a natural disaster that would become his first critical test. It was a terrorist attack.
When the deadly Bali bombings occurred on 12 October 2002, Greenwood flew to Darwin to lead the burns unit. Some 67 patients were treated by his team, 47 of which were personally attended to by Greenwood during a single, marathon 36-hour shift.
As well as earning his a Membership of the Order of Australia, it was that event that encouraged Greenwood in his side project: you know, just casually working on a medical breakthrough that could mean the end of traditional skin grafts.
Rather than painfully transplanting healthy skin from unburned areas of the patient’s body, Dr Greenwood has developed a method that involves taking a tiny portion and using it to grow more in a lab. Yep. Just pop the little bit of skin in Greenwood’s world-first, specially developed bioreactor, and 28 days later – voila – out comes 2.5 square metres of the stuff.
Okay, so a lot of science happens in between, but you get the gist.
In the meantime, patients can be treated with another of Dr Greenwood’s inventions: artificial skin. Basically, once surgeons remove the burned tissue, they can cover the wound with his expandable, biodegradable foam dressing, which not only prevents infection but ultimately acts as a scaffold for the new graft.
Once the lab-grown skin is placed on to it, the foam is eventually shed from the body over time, leaving the cells behind as a layer of skin.
It’s been ten years in the making, and early human trials have proved incredibly exciting; many months of healing becomes just weeks, severity of scarring is reduced and so is the pain.
If he pulls it off, it could revolutionise burns treatment and drastically alter (even save) the lives of thousands and thousands of victims around the world.
You know, just in case caring for one third of this continent wasn’t enough.