Emergency and Transport Services - Central Operations
The Alice Springs Base provides 24-hour primary emergency retrievals and inter-hospital transfers by our team of pilots, flight nurses and engineers. It serves an area of approximately 1.25 million square kilometres from Marla in northern South Australia to Newcastle Waters in the Northern Territory, in addition to the border regions of Western Australia.
Central Operations’ new state-of-the-art communications centre is located at Port Augusta, from which our Tasking Coordinators receive emergency calls, plan and assign all retrieval flights from Adelaide, Alice Springs and Port Augusta, whilst providing after hours back up for the Broken Hill Base (operated by South Eastern Section).
Our Adelaide Base and its team of pilots and flight nurses facilitates 24-hour emergency retrievals and inter-hospital transfers. It serves an area of approximately 840,000 square kilometres including the Yorke and Eyre Peninsulas, Mallee, South East and Riverland regions of South Australia, as well as the Sunraysia in NSW. The Adelaide Base is home to our engineering team who conduct heavy maintenance for the aircraft fleet situated across South Australia. It also provides the ability for emergency retrieval doctors from the major metropolitan hospitals to be flown to a patient requiring a high level of care.
RFDS Central Operations has a fleet of ten Pilatus PC-12's. Purpose built equipment carried on the aircraft includes two stretchers and a stretcher loading device, powered by the aircraft medical electrical system. It has been designed to enable easy, safe loading and unloading of stretcher patients without the need for difficult lifting.