04/06/2024
Royal Flying Doctor Service Charleville base celebrates 80 year anniversary
Australia’s oldest continuously operating Royal Flying Doctor’s base in Charleville is celebrating 80 years of providing aerial health care to western Queenslanders.
This month marks the 80th anniversary of Australia’s longest running Royal Flying Doctors Service base to remain in one location.
The Charleville RFDS base services a massive 622,000sq km area and has a long history of connecting south western Queenslanders to often lifesaving health services.
Established in 1928 by the Reverend John Flynn from Cloncurry, Queensland, the RFDS has grown to become one of the world’s largest and most comprehensive aeromedical
organisations.
Over the past 14 years alone, RFDS Charleville has flown almost 6.5 million kilometres to treat more than 56,000 patients across more than 6700 clinics and undertaken 8200 transfers – the equivalent of eight return trips to the moon.
Charleville nurse manager Joanne Mahony, who was from Warwick originally, started off her 25 year nursing career with a placement at Charleville Hospital where she fell in love with the town.
“It’s a lovely little country town and when I was young it had a lovely social life. Now I’m married, I’ve got kids and it’s a lovely place for them to grow up,” Ms Mahony said.
“I obviously grew up in a rural environment and then I did a placement at Charleville Hospital at the end of my nursing training and just really liked the variety rural nursing offered.
“It’s amazing from a nursing point of view what you get to do, you’re looking after neonatal, geriactric care, primary health and emergency care.
“It’s a really diverse job and I can safely say after 20 years no two days have been the same at all.
“It’s a really interesting job, it combines both primary health care work and you get the emergency work.
“We fly out to those very remote communities and stations and get to provide care in really unusual circumstances.
“It keeps you interested. It makes it easy to come into work.
“We have a lovely patient cohort we look after, the people of western Queensland are beautiful and we’re quite lucky to look after them.”
Ms Mahony said her job has taken her all across the state and the country, with her recalling a time when she picked up a patient off the Birdsville track in the far western corner of Queensland.
She said the furtherest she’s travelled while working at the base is to the Clifton Hills Station just across the border into South Australia.
“We’re the longest serving base in the same location so that’s pretty important,” Ms Mahony said.
“When I think back about John Flynn, he really was an innovator in his time.
“He came up with the concept of something that was pretty new technology at the time with the radios and with using flight to get to patients because he understood that tyranny of distance.
“It’s important to celebrate something so important because without RFDS some people or a lot of people wouldn’t be able to live in these remote areas.
“My passion is remote health care and I work with people who are equally as passionate about remote health care regardless of their discipline.”
Fellow nurse Diane Dowrick shares a passion for helping keep rural Australia going, thanks to in large part the RFDS who make it possible for people to live remotely.
“In our role we provide that support for the families that choose and live in a remote area,” Ms Dowrick said.
“Without our support and service a lot of those families wouldn’t be able to live in those areas.
“So knowing we are their primary health care provider in times when things are going good and also when there’s an accident or crisis in a remote area - we are their first contact.
“I think our job is so special because no two days are ever the same and we just meet so many different people from so many different walks of life.
“We look after the pregnant ladies right up until they go away to give birth and we get to see their little ones when they come back.
“I think it’s the special people in the outback in rural areas that makes it very rewarding.
“I think if John Flynn were still here, he would be proud that we’ve had that 80 years of continuous service in one base.
“Even though the service is 95 years old, it’s a special achievement for the (Charleville) base to be operating for that period of time.
“Obviously the grassroots from where we came from to where we are now, that’s a pretty significant milestone.
“I feel quite privileged to be part of the lives of some of the communities that we go into.”
In Queensland, the RFDS operates from nine bases at Brisbane, Bundaberg, Cairns,
Charleville, Longreach, Mount Isa, Rockhampton, Roma, and Townsville.
