'It seems like yesterday’
Australian volunteer Wayne Barnes reflects on his approach to sharing his skills internationally as a paramedic, emergency rescuer and teacher.
Wayne Barnes was awarded an Emergency Services Medal in the 2025 King’s Birthday Honours for his service to the State Emergency Service (SES) in Victoria.
This honour falls against the backdrop of Wayne’s extensive career in paramedicine and rescue, including two volunteering stints in Vanuatu with the Australian Volunteers Program.
Wayne’s career — in which volunteering featured heavily — centres on service to paramedicine and rescue, and in more recent years has turned to teaching and lecturing. Volunteering has always been important to Wayne. 'I’ve always been involved, in some very structured and formal ways or other less formal ways, in volunteering activities pretty much throughout the last 40 to 45 years,' he says.
From Victoria, Australia to Port Vila, Vanuatu
Wayne had his focus set on a volunteering opportunity with program partner ProMedical in Vanuatu long before applying to go on assignment as an Australian volunteer. He became aware of the organisation through his career at Ambulance Victoria, where many colleagues had already contributed to ProMedical.
Wayne first volunteered with ProMedical in 2016-17. At the time, Wayne had recently retired from Ambulance Victoria, and says his role as a volunteer Mobile Intensive Care Ambulance (MICA) Paramedic Instructor allowed him to re-connect with his passion for patient care.
'In my heart of hearts, I’m always happiest when I’m in the ambulance, in the back with a patient - so that was the reward that I got from being a volunteer in Vanuatu. Although I was there largely in an education and training role, it enabled me to have my one-on-one patient time as well,' reflects Wayne.
Upon his return to Australia, Wayne kept up his connection with Vanuatu and ProMedical, using semester breaks from his university teaching roles to 'take myself to Vanuatu just for three or four weeks just to hone my clinical skills again, just to keep in touch with the team and try and support them however I could.'
Returning to Vanuatu
Wayne’s second assignment with ProMedical arose in 2021, when the organisation invited him to support their student paramedics with distance-learning requirements. At the time, several student paramedics based at ProMedical were enrolled in an Australian-based course, and due to border closures, assessors from the Australian course-provider could not arrive in Vanuatu to assess the students.
'Essentially some of the students had completed all the academic requirements of the course but they needed to be assessed on the practical elements of the course,' explains Wayne.
As his home state of Victoria was headed into another COVID-19 lockdown and international flights into Vanuatu were drastically reduced, Wayne decided that 'the only way that I would go in was as an Australian volunteer, because of the support that you have [at the program].’
Working closely with ProMedical and the Australian-based course provider, Wayne’s role as a volunteer Clinical Instructor was to support the students through their training and assess their skills.
'I had to work with the students on a daily basis - assessing them, running a weekly tutorial on various topics. I was out with them on the road assessing their clinical skills, for hundreds of different skills or tasks they had to be assessed on,' recalls Wayne.
Collaborating to communicate
'At the time I was the only Intensive Care Paramedic on Efate (one of the principal islands of Vanuatu), so I was also going out on calls at all hours of day and night,' explains Wayne. He says he regularly attended cases that he would never encounter as a paramedic in Australia’s south-east. These included ‘stonefish envenomation, dive decompression illness, and various traumas that you just wouldn’t see here in Australia,’ says Wayne.
Wayne worked closely with his Ni-Vanuatu colleagues to navigate the language and cultural contexts on these cases. 'I relied a lot on the Ni-Vanuatu students with language and understanding some aspects of culture…I had to learn and understand.'
‘It seems like yesterday in a lot of ways,’ says Wayne as he reflects on his volunteer experience with ProMedical. As far as future international volunteering opportunities, Wayne’s enthusiasm is clear: 'I’m ready to go! For sure!'
'I’ve always felt that I’ve gained more out of my experiences than what I’ve been able to contribute,' says Wayne.
