Despite this column title, the Oil and Gas Journal is not turning into a doctor magazine. But we have had special reports on remote medicine and have recognized that physicians, nurses, and paramedics are joining geologists, engineers, and project managers as essential members of oil industry teams seeking and producing new resources far offshore, in the desert and jungle, and on the tundra. As a result, this editor, with industry help, has put together a conference on this subject.
Whether a roughneck, engineer, or manager, oil workers often must face assignments in isolated locations and extreme cold, heat, humidity, or trauma-and in the wrong place, diseases.
That's where the doctor and OGJ's Health Care & Trauma at Remote Locations (HECTRA-www.hectraogj.com) conference, Feb. 26-28 in Houston, come in. This second conference will be a meeting ground for managers and medical professionals charged with keeping employees healthy, mentally and physically, while getting the work done.
Our interest in this goes back to 1996, when this editor went to Russia for interviews and material on medical air evacuations of oil workers from Siberia to Helsinki. In those days before regulations and bureaucrats chilled optimism, Russia and the rest of the former Soviet Union were seen as an El Dorado for oil and gas. Companies big and small wanted a piece of the action.
Primitive medicine
But they found the health risks appalling (OGJ, Apr. 29, 1996, p. 33). Medical infrastructure was primitive, and local doctors lacked training.
One Texas paramedic for an oil company in Siberia who became fluent in Russian told OGJ that he actually passed the Russian medical exam and became a fully licensed physician while there. Then American medics tell of the truly outstanding, practicing Russian surgeon at one location. He was only 22 years old. Russian physicians and surgeons occupied a lowly status in the communist society-and still do. But western physicians there are impressed by how dedicated some are and how they do so much with so little.
First-class foreign clinics are being set up, but by and large, you still take your own medic, medicine, and needles to the Arctic and Siberia and get out on a costly medivac jet if something serious happens.
Russia is just one example. Other regions bring their own set of challenges, such as tuberculosis and malaria. Another remote location is an airliner cabin, say at 35,000 ft of altitude over the Greenland Sea What does the flight crew do when a heart stops? Also scary are blood clots or the "coach-class syndrome" caused by tight seats and lack of movement during long flights. Medical directors with frequent flyers and rotators are involved with such problems and with germs in cabin air, stress, and jet lag.
AIDS pandemic
But these hazards pale in comparison with the AIDS pandemic in sub-Saharan Africa. It is playing havoc with the industry work force, particularly in Nigeria and Angola, two of the world's hottest exploration and production arenas.
Chevron Corp. is one of Africa's largest operators, producing some 900,000 b/d of oil and natural gas liquids there. The company recognized the threat of AIDS to its work force and operations about 10 years ago, according to Dr. Stephen R. Simpson, the company's regional medical director for Africa in Luanda, Angola. He says the impact on the work force is huge. Some companies must train two or three employees for one job to cover for illness and death.
Dr. Simpson will head a panel of international professionals at the HECTRA conference. They will deal with AIDS and African oil operations and programs to stem this plague.
There and elsewhere in the oil world, major demands are being put on oil companies to furnish costly medical treatment to their local workers and families. It is no longer a matter of just taking care of the expatriate.