St Vincent’s Northside shares knowledge and skills with Royal Flying Doctor Service clinicians

St Vincent’s Private Hospital Northside is partnering for the first time with the Royal Flying Doctor Service to provide invaluable education for the doctors and nurses working for one of the largest aeromedical operations in the world.

St Vincent’s is providing an all-day interactive education and training session for RFDS doctors who deliver primary and emergency healthcare around the state.

St Vincent’s Health Australia is Australia’s largest not-for-profit provider of health and aged care services with a commitment to improving health access and outcomes across Australia including in rural and remote regions.

The all-day training and education session will be held at St Vincent’s Private Hospital Northside on Friday, June 6, and will feature some of the hospital’s most highly skilled Visiting Medical Officers (specialists) covering cardiology, infectious diseases, oncology, rheumatology, back pain, lung cancer screening guidelines, fatty liver disease and imaging interpretation.

St Vincent’s Private Hospital Northside CEO Oli Steele says the hospital is proud and delighted to be working with one of Australia’s most iconic health care providers and an organisation that has been the medical lifeline for almost 90 years for anyone who lives, works and travels in rural and remote Australia.

"The Royal Flying Doctor Service 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 RFDS,” says Oli.

“From St Vincent’s perspective, we’re in the fortunate position of having a team of VMOs with a great skill set and a high level of current knowledge around ever-evolving medical care in their specialty areas and we’re very happy that we can partner with RFDS to share that with some of their doctors who can ideally put it into practice during their primary care clinics.”

St Vincent's VMOs presenting at the education day will be:

Dr Alex Chaudhuri (Infectious Diseases Physician)
Dr Gerry Olive (Respiratory Physician)
Dr Srividya Katikireddi (Rheumatologist)
Dr Sami Ahmed (Specialist Pain Medicine Physician)
Dr Craig Hughes and Dr William O’Callaghan (Orthopaedic Surgeons)
Dr Monica Wagenaar (Endocrinologist)
Dr Jamie Reynolds (Urologist)
Dr Daniel Lancini (Cardiologist)

Around 30 people are expected to attend the education session, with RFDS doctors travelling from various regions around Queensland for the learning day.

Royal Flying Doctor Service (RFDS) (Queensland Section) Medical Education Lead (Primary Health Care) Dr Caroline Yates says the opportunity for the organisation’s Primary Health clinicians to meet colleagues and specialists for an education day in Brisbane is invaluable given the fact that they usually worked solo in remote locations around Queensland.

“These workshops are on important topics that are relevant to primary care clinicians and their patients. 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,” says Dr Yates.

“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.

“Having a well-respected private hospital such as St Vincent’s Northside host an event like this, across a broad range of topics is important for the health of our patients and we appreciate that it’s easier to get access to the specialists by holding it in Brisbane rather in regional RFDS bases, given the VMOs commitments to their patients.
“It’s also beneficial for RFDS clinicians to see other health services and meet the specialists to which they could be referring their patients.”

St Vincent’s Private Hospital Infectious Diseases Physician Dr Alex Chaudhuri says he’s looking forward to speaking with 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. It usually goes to the nearest, most appropriate public hospital in the region,” he says.

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, Dr Rob Stable, who worked as a flying doctor with 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. For example, the breadth of pathology that’s encountered and the relatively limited resources they work with,” says Dr Chaudhuri.

“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.”

St Vincent’s Northside shares knowledge and skills with Royal Flying Doctor Service clinicians

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