In a regular week Ms Tipping divides her time between working as an associate nursing manager at Bendigo Health and as a midwife at St John of God, but when need arises elsewhere she is always among the first to put up her hand to help out.

Having previously worked with disaster recovery teams in Swaziland and Papua New Guinea, Ms Tipping jumped at the chance to join an Australian Medical Assistance Team in Vanuatu after tropical cyclone Pam cut its terrible swath through the tiny pacific nation last month.

"I really enjoy working with those less fortunate than we are here," she said.

"I put my name down to do the training initially because I knew that’s what (AUSMAT) were involved with, going to provide first care assistance following natural disasters and things like that, so the opportunity to do that was great."

Ms Tipping and the AUSMAT team, which was made up of 27 Australians including six Victorians, spent 10 days helping out at the country's main hospital in Port Vila and evacuating patients from the many smaller outlying islands.

"We had over 1300 presentations in the 10 days that we were there, ranging from minor injuries associated with the cyclone to wound infections and things like that," she said.

"We also saw a couple of more severe cases, including a young child with a head injury who was medically evacuated from one of the islands."

Ms Tipping spent most of her time utilising her midwifery skills, personally delivering or resuscitating a number of babies during her stay in Vanuatu, but her responsibilities didn't end there.

"We actually set up our own field hospital on site at Port Vila Hospital in the car park and we were seeing on average 70 to 80 patients a day coming through with wounds that we were cleaning, debriding and dressing," she said.

"I went over to a place called Tongoa to retrieve a pregnant woman who was in labour and the baby was coming breech, her first baby, so bottom first, and I had to bring her back into Port Vila Hospital."

Ms Tipping said the challenges that were always present in the wake of any natural disaster were compounded in Vanuatu by a lack of resources and the fact that many local medical staff were themselves affected by the disaster.

"Because a lot of the staff there were having to deal with their own issues and that sort of thing, obviously they're going to have to go home and manage their own houses that have suffered damage so they were losing a lot of their staff to deal with their own personal needs," she said.

"They don't have the staff and the experience to be able to ventilate patients long term so even within the birth suite a lot of the equipment was very basic.

"For wound care it was literally just a bit of gauze soaked in saline to pack the wounds and just clean them as much as possible and then just bring them back regularly to assess how the wounds were healing.

"They've got access to antibiotics and things like that so they were still able to give all those sorts of things but certainly they have nothing compared to what we've got here in Australia."

Ms Tipping said the team had brought all their own tents, food and equipment over with them from Australia, but ended up staying in a local resort as a way to boost the local economy.

The accommodation still wasn't quite five star, but no one complained.

"We had no hot water or power but that’s nothing, we can cope with that," she said.

"So that way we could put some money back into the economy, it kept local people employed so they could continue to make money, a lot of people are obviously going to be unemployed during the rebuilding phase and trying to get back to work is going to be an issue."

She said the workload was heavy but the camaraderie between the small group of Australians lightened the load.

"We'd work a 10 hour day from eight in the morning to six at night, we worked every day and then we'd come back to where we were staying and being a small team we spent a lot of time together," she said.

"There was a lot of debriefing because obviously when you're in an environment like that you need to talk about what you're seeing and what you've done so we did a lot of that, and playing cards."

Ms Tipping said the road ahead for Vanuatu would be a long one but she was struck by the endurance of the local population.

"Thankfully the medical need wasn't as great as first expected so it's really good for the ni-Van people that they've come through relatively unscathed health wise and it's good to see that we weren't required for a longer period of time," she said.

"I think further down the track there might be some mental health issues that they might be having to help people out with but there's ongoing things being put in place to support people through other organisations that are already over there volunteering.

"It's amazing to see the resilience of the Ni-van people, how they've just come together to try and get back on their feet as quickly as possible.

"They certainly weren't complaining, they were out there cleaning, every day we were walking past there was more structure going back up, more people working together to put their roofs back on, so you just saw this amazing group of people who were resilient and who just wanted to get back to normal life as quickly as possible."