Page 226 - Week 01 - Thursday, 13 February 2020
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circumstances we refer people to the AirRater app as a very important tool for Canberrans whose health is affected by environmental factors such as smoke and pollen. The ACT health protection service does not have its own app because AirRater has been developed by a national team of leading researchers in environmental and public health and uses data from the ACT government and other government monitoring stations around the country.
AirRater has been designed for a particular purpose, for people who have asthma, allergy and hayfever, to help them monitor symptoms and understand their triggers. It was not specifically designed for the intense smoke events we experienced this summer. Nevertheless, for Canberrans wanting to access closer to real-time information than the 24-hour rolling average on the ACT Health website, AirRater continued to be a useful reference in the early part of this concerning smoke season. I want to acknowledge the work of Shalev Nessaiver in developing CanberraAir.com, using data from AirRater and presenting it in a way that I know many Canberrans found extremely helpful.
The ACT Health website itself has for some time presented the rolling 24-hour average air quality data. This accords with international standards and the way in which research has been conducted on the impact of air quality, looking at exposure over 24-hour periods. During this unprecedented event, the community asked if the government could also provide hourly reporting of air quality data. The health protection service listened and responded: on 7 January it launched a new site with easy to understand hourly PM2.5 air quality updates. I thank Minister Rattenbury for explaining what PM2.5 is all about.
This supported the information the health protection service was also providing, through a “Heavy smoke and hot conditions in the ACT” webpage, established to maintain a single source of truth for the general public. This site included a frequently asked questions page, details about the distribution of masks, air quality monitoring, and helpful advice to manage one’s mental health. These changes and the updates that were provided throughout this event are lessons that can inform a strategy and help planning for the future.
It is important to recognise that in doing this we were not alone. I visited Westmead Hospital on 19 December. On the new helipad, I was told that normally you could see the Blue Mountains from there. You could barely see five streets away, as Sydney was engulfed in smoke that day. We are all familiar with the impact of the smoke on the Australian Open preliminaries in mid-January in Melbourne. Therefore, it is important, in developing advice and continuing this work, that the ACT, while working fast, does not work alone. The role of the Australian Health Protection Principal Committee, made up of chief medical officers and chief health officers from around the country, will be really important.
Very few in the community knew what PM2.5 meant or what a P2/N95 mask was before this summer. I think it is safe to say that most Canberrans are now well aware of both the masks’ use and their limitations. The ACT government moved swiftly to make P2/N95 masks available for vulnerable Canberrans, such as those sleeping rough who were vulnerable to prolonged outdoor exposure to smoke. These masks
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