Dr Arabella Koliwan

Arabella is a Papua New Guinean trained emergency physician who completed her specialist training in late 2020. In her first role as an EP, Arabella has taken on the difficult task of providing specialist emergency care at Hela Provincial Hospital, in the Highlands region of PNG.

Hela Province represents one of the most testing environments for health care provision in PNG, and is essentially the first emergency physician there. Arabella has been building a service where very little in the way of emergency care existed previously.

As a lone EP in remote PNG, building emergency care systems and models of care has been difficult; the COVID-19 pandemic, on-going tribal conflict, and limited access to primary health care services also serving as additional challenges. Arabella hopes to share insights gained into capacity building in emergency care in the remote, low-resource setting of PNG.