The Royal Flying Doctor Service (RFDS) (Queensland Section) is proud to partner with St Vincent’s Private Hospital Northside today to deliver interactive education and training sessions to our aeromedical and primary health care clinicians.
Around 30 people are expected to attend the education session, with RFDS doctors travelling from various regions around Queensland for the learning day.
The training will feature some of the hospital’s most highly skilled specialists covering cardiology, infectious diseases, oncology, rheumatology, back pain, lung cancer screening guidelines, fatty liver disease and imaging interpretation.
RFDS Medical Education Lead Primary Health Care Dr Caroline Yates said the opportunity was invaluable to the team given the fact that their primary health clinicians often work solo in remote locations around Queensland.
“These workshops are on important topics that are relevant to primary care clinicians and their patients,” Dr Yates said.
“It’s also helpful for the specialists to be aware and supportive of the remote and resource-scarce environment in which RFDS doctors and nurses work.
“Many primary health education events assume that the GPs have an imaging facility down the road, or that our patients can pop into a specialist easily!
“The reality is that for the RFDS patients, the nearest radiology or specialist department may be hundreds of kilometres away.
“Meeting specialists who are willing to learn about the logistics that affect us, and our patients, is highly desirable.”
St Vincent’s Private Hospital Northside CEO Oli Steele said the hospital was delighted to be working with one of Australia’s most iconic healthcare providers, which has been the medical lifeline for those who live, work and travel in rural and remote Australia for almost 100 years.
“The RFDS has had such a long and extraordinarily vital role in the health care of residents, workers and visitors in regional Australia and St Vincent’s sees this as a wonderful opportunity to engage with the dedicated and talented GPs who work for the RFDS,” Oli said.
“From St Vincent’s perspective, we’re in the fortunate position of having a team of Visiting Medical Officers with a great skill set and a high level of current knowledge around ever-evolving medical care in their specialty areas.
“We’re very happy that we can partner with the RFDS to share that with some of their doctors who can ideally put it into practice during their primary care clinics.”
St Vincent’s Private Hospital Infectious Diseases Physician Dr Alex Chaudhuri said he’s looking forward to speaking with the RFDS about how he and his colleagues can help their clinicians best navigate the private health system.
“I appreciate that the private system can be challenging to navigate for clinicians in rural and remote regions where a referral needs to go through to a person (a specialist) whereas in the public system it’s more straightforward because the referral pathways or catchments are well-established and coordinated by Retrieval Services Queensland,” he said.
“It usually goes to the nearest, most appropriate public hospital in the region.”
While it’s Dr Chaudhuri’s first education session for the RFDS, he has more personal experience of the incredible work of the service’s doctors from discussions over the years with his father-in-law, Emeritus Professor Robert Stable AM.
Dr Stable worked as a Flying Doctor with the RFDS in Charleville and Port Augusta for three years and remains engaged with the Queensland branch as a current Board member.
“What has struck me from his experience was the incredible resourcefulness, pragmatism and resilience that’s required for doctors working in rural and remote regions,” Dr Chaudhuri said.
“For example, the breadth of pathology that’s encountered and the relatively limited resources they work with.
“So, I’m very interested to hear first-hand from our RFDS colleagues about the unique challenges that they face on a daily basis working in the regions, which could include restricted access to certain diagnostic options or indeed the antibiotic options that we take for granted in major metropolitan hospitals.”
