LifeAid Emergency Care

Public service announcement:

I’ve set up Ann Close’s LinkedIn. 🎉

For those who don’t know Ann, she’s spent the last four decades doing all the things that keep healthcare and training organisations functioning:

☎️ answering phones

📋 coordinating courses

💰 paying people

🚑 organising equipment

👩‍⚕️ supporting students and staff

📦 moving approximately one million items of first aid training equipment from one side of Victoria to the other

While Alan collected stories, Ann has made sure the organisation actually functioned 🤭

If you’ve crossed paths with Ann through nursing, midwifery, training, events, conferences or LifeAid over the years, we’d love for you to connect with her.

She’s got a few stories of her own 😊

Check out Ann Close’s profile on LinkedIn

Ann Close - LifeAid Pty Ltd | LinkedIn I trained in nursing and midwifery and have had a career spanning clinical healthcare… · Experience: LifeAid Pty Ltd · Location: 3136 · 1 connection on LinkedIn. View Ann Close’s profile on LinkedIn, a professional community of 1 billion members.

🚒 Public service announcement 🚑

After considerable effort, groaning from both of us, archaeological investigation, and the recovery of credentials believed to be lost to history, I have successfully revived dad's LinkedIn profile.

This is important because Alan Close has spent the last 40+ years working across ambulance services, MICA, air ambulance retrieval, military service, remote healthcare, emergency management and LifeAid.

His previous LinkedIn strategy appeared to be:

Name: Alan Close
Occupation: --

So if we've worked together over the years, crossed paths on a deployment, sat on a committee, attended training, argued about paramedicine, flown in a helicopter, or generally wandered through the emergency services world together, I'd love it if you connected with him.

He's not big on self-promotion, but his contribution to paramedicine, emergency care and training in Australia deserves to be visible.

Give him a follow, connect, and say hello.

(And yes, Dad, this post is about you. You're welcome.)

Alan Close - LifeAid Pty Ltd | LinkedIn Alan Close is an Intensive Care Paramedic, healthcare leader and co-founder of LifeAid… · Experience: LifeAid Pty Ltd · Education: College for Law and Justice Administration · Location: Australia · 4 connections on LinkedIn. View Alan Close’s profile on LinkedIn, a professional community of ...

Emergency Response Team support is often discussed in terms of equipment, vehicles and qualifications. Those things matter. But one of the most important parts of effective ERT support is understanding that no two environments are the same, and no environment stays the same forever.

A mine site in northern Australia.
A fire-affected landscape.
An icy mountain road.

Each presents different risks, different operational challenges and different demands on the people working there.

Over time we've learned that effective support is not just about arriving with capability. It's about understanding the environment, adapting to changing conditions, building relationships with crews and developing familiarity with the places where people work.

The best ERT support combines preparation, experience and local understanding - because conditions change, and the response has to change with them. https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/field-note-things-you-cant-buy-kirstie-close-5isec

Field Note: The Things You Can't Buy When people think about Emergency Response Teams, they often think about equipment. Vehicles.

What does it mean to provide healthcare in a remote environment?

Sometimes it means understanding the place just as much as the medicine.

A few years ago, LifeAid was invited to support Whelans during the Bogong High Plains Road landslip remediation works. What began as a relatively straightforward deployment became a much longer journey. Our crews remained involved long enough to watch the mountain transform. The same project experienced snow, heavy rainfall, changing access conditions and everything in between.

The photos below were all taken during the same project.
Different seasons.
Different conditions.
Different risks.
The healthcare response had to evolve alongside them.

While emergency response capability is an important part of these projects, much of the work involved primary healthcare, preventative care and supporting workers over the long term. Helping people stay healthy, safe and able to continue their work in a challenging environment.

One of the lessons we took from Bogong was that remote healthcare is never just about people.
It's also about place.
Understanding the terrain.
Understanding the weather.
Understanding how work changes as conditions change.

The medicine matters. But the environment shapes almost everything else.

We're grateful to have been part of a project that not only restored an important road connection, but reminded us how closely communities, work and place are interlinked.

LifeAid is recruiting an Operations Coordinator.

This role sits at the intersection of emergency medical operations, training, deployments, logistics, workforce coordination, and the organised chaos that comes with supporting people in complex environments.

We’re looking for someone who can help build systems that are calm, practical, scalable, and human. Someone comfortable moving between spreadsheets, field realities, phone calls, deployment planning, and the thousand small details that keep operations running.

The work spans training operations, remote and industrial healthcare, emergency response support, and event medical services across a wide operational footprint. The goal is to keep oversight and systems deeply connected to the people doing the work on the ground.

If that sounds like your kind of environment, we’d love to hear from you.

Operations Coordinator Job in Croydon South, Melbourne VIC - SEEK Operations Coordinator supporting medical, training & remote operations across dynamic regional and deployment environments.

On Anzac Day, we remember not only those who served, but those who cared for the wounded in the harshest conditions imaginable.

From battlefield stretcher-bearers to the earliest aeromedical evacuations, their work changed the story of survival.
Care moved closer.
Time to treatment shortened.

That legacy lives on in every medic, every responder, every act of showing up when it matters most.

At LifeAid, we carry that forward.
Not as history. As practice.

Lest we forget.

🇦🇺 25 April