Meet the New England doctor who studied dive pressure on humans to treat illnesses

Prince of Wales Hospital's hyperbaric medicine unit was renamed to the Bennett-Unsworth Centre for Diving and Hyperbaric Unit for retired doctor Ian Unsworth - who now calls Tenterfield home - and his successor Mike Bennett.

Dr Unsworth said it was a fascinating field of medicine, which is primarily known for treating bubbles in the bloodstream when divers decompress too quickly - known commonly as the bends.

Hyperbaric chambers can create high-pressure environments allowing patients to receive high concentrations of oxygen to increase healing and fight infections.

"Hyperbaric medicine covers an enormous range of problems only one of which is bends in divers. More common are severe life-threatening infections such as gas gangrene, slow-healing wounds in diabetics, and non-healing fractures," Dr Unsworth said.

One of the earlier uses for the chambers was patients with carbon monoxide poisoning.

"That was largely through coal gas being supplied to big cities, that was remedied when natural gas was installed."

Dr Unsworth hails from the UK where as a young British doctor he met his future wife, Clare, an Australian nurse.

"It's always been said young doctors marry nurses or barmaids because they're the only two sort of women they meet and I met a lovely nurse," Dr Unsworth said with a laugh.

The pair had met in England and married there, but Clare had desires to return home to Australia.

A year earlier Dr Unsworth had taken up research with the Royal British Navy on the effects of deep-diving and pressure at naval research laboratories in Alverstoke on England's southern coast.

So it was the obvious choice when Ian was head-hunted by Australian doctors to open the first and largest public hyperbaric unit in the Southern Hemisphere in 1968.

"We spent nearly a year there and I was researching the pressure of deep-diving and gas mixtures on humans," Dr Unsworth said.

"I was head-hunted from Britain and I was interviewed by an Australian doctor who happened to be in London at the time and I was recruited to come to Prince Henry Hospital in Sydney to set up this hyperbaric chamber - there was no other civilian chamber at all in Australia.

"There were a few small ones used only by the navy."

Clare got her wish, the pair were coming back to Australia with their first-born child.

"My eldest daughter was just a small child then - Clare was coming home and I was coming in as a migrant," Dr Unsworth said.

The renamed unit also features a shield with a heraldry design drawn by their eldest daughter Fiona as a 10-year-old in 1973.

They spent two years setting up the unit with a large multi-compartment chamber and smaller high pressure one for divers.

The hyperbaric unit opened its doors in 1970 with Dr Unsworth at the helm.

Then it was at the Prince Henry Hospital, which was later turned into housing blocks and the unit was transferred to the Prince of Wales Hospital in 1995.

"The Prince Henry unit was closed in January 1995, the last patient a diver suffering from decompression sickness," Dr Unsworth said.

The new unit at the Prince of Wales hospital in Randwick opened in 1996 with Dr Mike Bennett as Director.

"I retired from the directorship and passed it to a good friend of mine Mike Bennett in 1996," he said.

He had been director since its inception 28 years earlier.

Dr Bennett then led the unit for a further 25 years, but sadly died in December 2023 and wasn't able to witness the renaming ceremony in their honour.

Ian was full of praise for his team, who were dedicated to learning their craft and understanding the enormous risks of working with high pressures.

"We had two chambers, a very large one and a smaller one for much higher pressures for mostly diving problems and all my staff were fabulous," Dr Unsworth said.

The team of nurses would go inside the chamber with the patients - and if they were particularly sick the doctors would also.

And operating the chambers were the staff Dr Unsworth affectionately dubbed the "Drivers" as they had the technical know-how to operate the pressure mechanisms.

He had exclusively employed former navy divers as they were well aware of the risks of working with pressures and decompression. The hyperbaric units in each state have kept up this tradition.

"And it's a tradition I'm pleased to say they've maintained," Dr Unsworth said.

"They have all kept up this tradition of hiring Australian clearance divers as to be the ones with the expertise to 'drive the chamber'."

There are also benefits from the chambers for expediting recovery for some conditions.

"The chambers have more practical uses - diabetics who have a problem with slow-healing wounds can receive oxygen fives days a week for four-to-five weeks their healing was much improved."

There's benefits to any slow-healing including skin grafts for burn victims, but also slow bone recovery as well.

Over Dr Unsworth's 28 years at the helm he said they had seen "some very interesting cases" and remarked how he had spoken at the renaming ceremony about the various human and non-human cases they had been able to treat.

"We did research and treatment, there was a dog with gas gangrene, and we did research with goats and rats and were looking at the effects of diving and decompression," he said.

He said testing juvenile rats showed no adverse side-affects to diving and that research helped guide safety measures for humans scuba-diving.

"At that time, no one knew what the minimum age to allow scuba diving was ... I think the minimum age is now 10-years-old," Dr Unsworth said.

Dr Unsworth and Clare had two more children, Fiona is their eldest daughter, followed by their son Jeremy and their youngest daughter Adrianne.

All are adults and the couple are proud to boast eight grandchildren.

"There was an old saying that navy divers always had girls, I had kept that in the back of my mind and when we had our son I thought 'Oh oh, well I'm not a true navy diver then," he said with a laugh.

Dr Unsworth also joked that he was pleased his times "popping into the chamber and experimenting in scuba researching pressure" hadn't impacted his ability to have children.