After surviving a devastating crash that left him relearning how to walk and talk, Daniel Woolley is now helping thousands of SA students understand the real consequences of risky choices through the state’s powerful P.A.R.T.Y. Program.
It was Good Friday, April 2017, when Daniel Woolley’s life split in two.
He doesn’t remember the moment that changed everything – or, because of his brain injury, the four years leading up to it.
What he knows comes from the people who stood by his bedside, the police report, and the scars that still map his body.
“I wish I had chosen when I was younger to be a good boy,” Daniel says. “My parents told me, the police told me, everyone told me to be a good boy. But then I learnt the really hard way.”
The crash that changed Daniel’s life
Daniel was driving on the Yorke Peninsula when he raced through a give-way sign. A car slammed into the side of him, rolling his vehicle multiple times and shaking his brain so violently he had a 20-minute seizure at the scene of the crash.
“When I arrived at the RAH (Royal Adelaide Hospital) my mum was told I had a 30 per cent chance of survival, because of all my injuries,” Daniel says.
“I had a brain injury, a ruptured spleen, and all of my insides got pushed up into my chest cavity, collapsing my lungs. I had a chest drain and abdominal drain and they’d put a bolt in my head to monitor the pressure on my brain.”
When Daniel woke from his coma two weeks later, he was at Hampstead Rehabilitation Centre.
“When I woke up, I could only move my right arm. I couldn’t move my body at all. I had no idea where I was or what had happened.”
Long road to recovery
The next four months were spent at Hampstead, Daniel relearning what he once did without thinking: talking, eating, standing, walking.
“It was basically like I was being reborn,” he says. “For 34 years, I’d been normal – like everyone else – and now, all of a sudden, I couldn’t move any parts of my body except my right arm.”
Recovery wasn’t just physical. It was emotional. It was slow. And it was relentless.
When Daniel left hospital, he still needed a walking frame. He moved back in with his parents and his mum gave up work for the next three years to be his full-time carer.
Slowly, he rebuilt his life. He saved his money, bought a house, met his neighbour, Carly, fell in love and married her – “on my birthday, so I’ll always remember”.
Even now, he still lives with the effects of the crash everyday – constant pain, short-term memory loss, a dry mouth from medication, and balance issues that make him “look like a skateboarder because my knees are always that banged up”.
A life reborn
Today, Daniel is 42 – but he says he’s also eight years old, “turning nine on the next Good Friday”.
“I was born again when I crashed my car. Not in a church way, but I was born again in a ‘good boy’ way.”
Daniel’s new life has meaning, joy and direction. He travels around Australia in his caravan. He enjoys spending time with his family. And he’s found purpose in sharing the “real, not sugar-coated truth” about risky decisions with young people.
For the past three-and-a-half years, Daniel has been part of South Australia’s P.A.R.T.Y. Program – a full-day experience designed to show teenagers exactly what can happen when things go wrong, and how a single choice can change everything.
“If I make a difference to one person’s life from each group we talk to, that one person is then connected to 50 to 100 other people. So really, I’m reaching lots and lots of people.
“It means the world to give back.”
A program that can change a young person’s life
The P.A.R.T.Y. Program – Prevent Alcohol and Risk-related Trauma in Youth – has been running in South Australia for 11 years. It features doctors, nurses, allied health professionals and emergency workers like paramedics and police – most of whom volunteer their time – in the hope they can reduce the incidence of trauma in young people.
In Australia, trauma accounts for around 40 per cent of all deaths in those aged 15-25 years, most commonly linked to road traffic accidents and other risk-taking behaviour involving alcohol or drugs.
“It’s a full-day excursion where students are immersed in what risk-taking behaviour can end up looking like,” says P.A.R.T.Y. Program state manager and intensive care nurse Sofia Carlmark. “They can come into the hospital, or we bring the program to their school”.
This year, the program has been delivered 90 times, with more than 2500 students participating.
Each session includes a scenario: two young people at a party who decide to drive after drinking or using illicit drugs. It’s fictional – but entirely realistic.
From there, the day unfolds like a real trauma case. Students move through stations that mimic the journey from crash site to emergency department to rehabilitation. They see – and touch – medical equipment. They hear the sounds. They do CPR. They smell the hospital. They meet clinicians whose job is to keep people alive in those crucial first minutes.
And then they meet someone like Daniel.
How trauma ambassadors deliver key message
“It’s all brought together by one of our six trauma ambassadors, who talk about what their life is like now after their crash,” Sofia says. “It’s impactful. It’s powerful. We’re not teachers, but we are talking from our real experience of being intensive care and emergency department nurses. We’ve seen a lot of terrible things that could have been prevented.”
The aim isn’t to frighten young people out of leaving the house, going to parties or having fun. It’s to show them that they always have the power to make a safer decision.
“We’re really trying to empower them so that they can make choices to get home safe at the end of the night,” Sofia says. “We want them to just stop and think for a second before getting into a car with somebody who’s been drinking or taking drugs, or before they drive themselves.”
Even one moment of hesitation can save a life.
“If they can just stop and think about what they learnt at the P.A.R.T.Y. Program in that moment and make a different choice, everything can change.”
‘We don’t want to see them come through our ED doors’
There’s a realism to the P.A.R.T.Y. Program experience that is almost impossible to replicate in a classroom. The hospital setting – the resus room, the alarms, the fast-paced action – brings the consequences into sharp focus.
“We are showing the students that things can and do go wrong in a split second. And we want them to feel like they have the knowledge and the power to change the outcome.”
Students often tell staff that the program helped them call for help early in a risky situation, or reminded them how to put a friend in the recovery position.
Others realise they might want to be a nurse, a physio, or a paramedic. Exposure to the hospital environment – the teamwork, the precision, the adrenaline – sometimes opens their minds to career paths they may not have considered.
“That’s an amazing byproduct of the program,” Sofia says. “But at its core it’s about prevention. Every staff member of the P.A.R.T.Y. Program feels really passionate about it because they’re imparting knowledge in the hopes that they will not see one of those students come through those emergency department doors.”
One storyteller, hundreds of changed minds
For Daniel, that message is deeply personal.
“I want to help prevent teenagers from making the same mistakes I did,” he says. “I’ve done drugs, I’ve done alcohol multiple times. It never ends up good for you. You think it’s fun at the time, but it’s not fun in the end … it pays to be a rule-follower, not a rule-breaker.”
“Everyone thinks, ‘it won’t happen to me’. And that’s exactly what I thought. But look at where I am now.
“I’m still affected by the crash and my bad life choices every day.”
Now, Daniel lives by alarms – more than a hundred of them on his phone – reminding him to take medication, complete tasks, and even to turn his other alarms back on.
He can’t ride motorbikes anymore. He carries pain, fatigue and numbness every day.
But he carries purpose too.
“My new life is my best life,” he says. “I want to be a good father to my children, a good husband, a good son for my parents. And I want to make a difference.”
The P.A.R.T.Y. Program gives him a way to do that – one room of teenagers at a time.
The P.A.R.T.Y. Program is run out of the Royal Adelaide Hospital, Lyell McEwin Hospital and Flinders Medical Centre, alongside regional hospitals and in-school presentations. For more information on the program and how it works, click here.
