Flying doctors hit winds of change

The Royal Flying Doctor Service is appealing for more government assistance. Photo / Supplied

The legendary Royal Flying Doctor Service, an icon of the Australian Outback, is in danger of having its wings clipped as it is forced to compete with commercial rivals.

For nearly 80 years, the RFDS has been a safety net for rural and remote Australia, flying in medical personnel, evacuating patients and conducting mobile clinics in isolated areas. The service is Australians' favourite charity, receiving the proceeds of many a school fete, its collection tins a familiar sight on pub counters.

Now the state governments which partly fund the not-for-profit organisation are reviewing its role in providing air ambulance services. In Victoria, it has already lost a A$70 million ($84.57 million) contract to a commercial operator, Pel-Air Aviation, while the New South Wales Government is considering rival bids for a contract worth nearly A$100 million ($120 million).

In Queensland, the Flying Doctor's biggest division, it recently won a contract to expand operations but was forced to bid for work for the first time.

The decision to expose the RFDS to the chill wind of commercialism is a severe blow to its army of supporters and fundraisers. Stephen Knox, who organises an annual Outback car trek to raise funds, described it as "a slap in the face".

The service - which inspired a BBC radio series in the 1950s, The Flying Doctor, as well as a long-running TV series - played a key role in the development of inland Australia.

The former Prime Minister, Robert Menzies, said it represented the "greatest single contribution to the effective settlement of the far distant back country". Even today large chunks of the continent would be virtually uninhabitable without it.

Radio and aviation were in their infancy when the Rev John Flynn took up a post at an isolated mission in South Australia. He saw their potential to overcome the twin problems of distance and communication.

The RFDS argues that, stripped of its lucrative air ambulance contracts, it will find it harder to fund other services, such as flying in doctors and nurses to provide primary health care in remote communities. Clyde Thomson, executive director of the southeast division, told the Australian newspaper: "The consequences [of losing the contracts] are significant."

However, Lim Kim Hai, chairman of Rex Air, which owns Pel-Air, noted that the contracts were only to provide aircraft and pilots. "There's no medical content," he said. The Red Cross and St John Ambulance, also held in high public regard, have to compete for public funds.

Most Australians, though, believe that the Flying Doctor - part of the lore and romance of the Outback - should be protected from commercial imperatives.

In the early years, RFDS pilots had no navigational aids or radio, only a compass and rudimentary maps. They used landmarks such as fences, rivers and telegraph lines to find their way, landing on claypans or hastily cleared paddocks.

Even today, planes often land on rudimentary dirt airstrips, lit at night by car headlights or kerosene flares. One pilot recalls being warned, before arriving at a remote property, that the airstrip was blanketed with wildflowers. No mention was made of the cattle, which he scattered by making an initial pass before landing.

The RFDS leaves medical chests containing numbered drugs and supplies at isolated farms, Aboriginal communities and mining camps. One farmer who spoke to a doctor by phone, describing his wife's symptoms, was advised to give her a number nine tablet. Later, he reported: "We'd run out of number nines, but I gave her one five and one four and she came good right away!"

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The Royal Flying Doctor Service was founded in 1928 by the Rev John Flynn, a Presbyterian Church minister, as a one-year experiment, based in the northwest Queensland town of Cloncurry.

The Flying Doctor developed nationally in the 1930s, and was the world's first comprehensive aerial medical service. It still covers an area the size of Western Europe.

Flynn's vision was to provide the Outback with a "mantle of safety".

Last year the RFDS attended to 260,000 patients.

In the year ended 2007, it flew nearly 22 million kilometres and made more than 65,000 landings.

The RFDS still relies heavily on trusts, donations and public appeals for funding.