Beth Lewis – Healthcare in Papua New Guinea’s Remote Communities

Meet Dr Beth Lewis as part of our series “Inspirational You, Awesome Sisters United” about women in medicine achieving incredible things in today’s world.

Beth Lewis is a courageous UK Doctor who has found her vocation in Papua New Guinea.

In 2009, Beth arranged her medical elective in Papua New Guinea as a “once in a lifetime” chance to experience rural medicine in the South Pacific.

Papua New Guinea is the largest, most populated Pacific Island Country. 80% of its 8.9 million people reside in rural areas, and 851 indigenous languages are spoken. Tribal warfare remains common, and traditional beliefs in supernatural causation of serious illness, and death by sorcery or witchcraft, are strongly entrenched.

Papuans have the lowest life expectancy in the Pacific at 64.5 years. Multi-drug resistant TB, HIV and malaria are common. Long-forgotten diseases such as Polio, which was eradicated in Papua New Guinea in 2000, managed to make a resurgence in 2018.

Old and young die of treatable illnesses such as pneumonia and diarrhoea, and there are regular outbreaks of preventable diseases such as whooping cough and diphtheria.

A profound lack of basic medicines and equipment means that rural clinics and even major hospitals regularly run out of antibiotics, analgesics and antimalarials.

Despite these challenges, Beth Lewis fell in love with Papua New Guinea and, inspired by the healthcare professionals she worked with, discovered that she could use her knowledge and skills to make a real difference to communities there.

Photos courtesy of Beth Lewis

After completing her F1 and F2 Foundation Doctor training years in the UK, Beth returned to Papua New Guinea. She was posted in a rural mission hospital founded by a New Zealand couple during their 20’s. The wife, now 90 years old, continued to run the facility with her 60-year-old daughter.

After an 8-month “internship”, Beth was asked to cover the partner district hospital for a couple of months while a replacement was found for the Papuan doctor who had worked there. This hospital was 6 hours away by canoe.

Beth immediately found herself on call 24 hours a day as the lead doctor for multiple specialties including General Medicine, Paediatrics, Obstetrics, and Trauma. She describes undertaking many terrifying, life-saving procedures for the first time, relying solely on textbooks for guidance.

Among these were:

• Her first solo emergency caesarean section for a patient with placenta praevia. Sadly, upon delivery she found that the baby had severe birth defects which were incompatible with life. To add to the stress, this procedure was interrupted by an earthquake!
• Her first laparotomy for a ruptured ectopic pregnancy was performed with no power (as the hospital generator was broken). The patient had to be brought close to the window for natural light, and the surgery was conducted with the assistance of a torch.
• She treated innumerable machete injuries, accidental and deliberate, including a man who turned up with a severed hand in a bucket, demanding that it be reattached.
• Crocodile and pig bites were also commonplace!

Beth’s “couple of months” emergency cover stretched into 3 years.

Beth Lewis returned to the UK in 2017 and worked in A&E for 18 months. During that time, she felt palpable relief of having support from senior colleagues and not being called upon 24/7. However, she also missed the autonomy she had had in Papua New Guinea.

In January 2019, Beth set off on a different adventure to Africa to work as a doctor in Sierra Leone. However, her experience was marred by a horrifying armed break-in at the hospital.

Beth studied for the Diploma of Tropical Medicine and Hygiene in Tanzania and Uganda and also spent time on a mercy ship in the Peruvian Amazon.

In January 2020, shortly before the Covid-19 Pandemic, Beth returned to Papua New Guinea for a 3-week visit. Suddenly the world closed, borders shut, flights were terminated, and Beth once again found herself a long-term resident.

This time she was stationed in a rural out-patient clinic in the middle of a swamp, 100 miles from the nearest town and provincial hospital.

Since being stuck due to Covid, Beth has continued to work there. The needs of the community are great, and Beth’s duties seem impossible to most of us.

Last year, she managed five simultaneous casualties on her own, including having to amputate one man’s arm in the back clinic room after it was severed in a fight.

She treated three members of the same family (two teenage sisters and their uncle), who all died from suspected homicidal poisoning. She delivered babies in canoes, managed multiple obstetric complications, and inserted blind drains for TB effusions.

Beth lives in rat-infested accommodation and has been bitten by a poisonous snake. No, of course there was no antivenom available! She was lucky to survive due to quick application of compression bandaging.

Finding love in a pacific island when you are working 24 hours a day in a culturally different community is challenging. And, at times, heart-breaking.

However, Beth has found the love of her life in a beautiful baby girl, Ruthie, who was abandoned at birth and left in the hospital nursery. She was born with cleft palate and labelled a “syndromic, abnormal child.”

No one took her for adoption and there is no foster system in Papua New Guinea. Beth is delighted to now call Ruthie her fully adopted legal daughter.