
Dr Sean Parsons saw firsthand the huge impact of a pandemic when he was only a few years out of UQ and working as a young doctor in the emergency department of Caboolture Hospital.
What he saw on the frontline in 2009 was a system in crisis, barely coping with the large number of people presenting with suspected swine flu, whose symptoms could only be accurately diagnosed through sending samples to a laboratory from which they would return several days later.