“If you can retrieve in the Northern Territory, particularly in the Top End of Australia, you can retrieve anywhere in the world.”
These are the words of Professor Dianne Stephens OAM, whose accomplished career as an intensive care doctor has included leading the ICU response for the 2002 Bali Bombings, serving for the RAAF in Iraq and working through the 2016 Cyclone Winston in Fiji.
These days, Professor Stephens leads the School of Medicine at Charles Darwin University (CDU), which last year celebrated the inaugural graduates of Australia’s first Master of Aeromedical Retrieval qualification – an innovative program developed alongside the Flying Doctor.
Launched in 2021 by CDU in Darwin, the curriculum was developed in collaboration with the RFDS, the National Critical Care and Trauma Response Centre (NCCTRC) and other aeromedical specialists in aims to facilitate new career pathways for nurses, doctors and logistics professionals based in Australia and abroad.
The program analyses the essentials of retrieval from neonatal care to adult care.
“We probably have one of the most challenging aeromedical retrieval settings in the Top End – the geography, the culture and the sparseness of the population makes it a really unique environment… and then you throw in the weather. All of those factors make it a really rich training ground for aeromedical retrieval,” Professor Stephens said.
“When we conceived the program, we looked to our partners and we had colleagues from the RFDS and aeromedical retrieval specialists from across the country join us in creating a unique curriculum.”
We love working with the RFDS because of its ethos. To me, it’s not an organisation – it’s a group of people that come to together to provide critical services to remote and regional Australia.
Professor Dianne Stephens OAM
Highlighting the program’s global focus to upskill clinicians across borders, anaesthetists Dr Hilbert Toviriki of Papua New Guinea and Fijians Dr Emily Fuakilau and Dr Kartik Mudliar were the three doctors to graduate the masters program in 2024.
The doctors since returned to the Pacific region and are imparting their nuanced disaster medicine, domestic and international logistics and trauma management knowledge gained from the course – vital skills given many Pacific countries’ desire to grow aeromedical capacity to tackle the isolation and remoteness many communities face.
“We have a responsibility to our neighbours in the region and sharing the prosperity that Australia has,” Professor Stephens said.
“In places like Fiji, you have multiple small islands, a complex retrieval environment and limited health services – we have a duty of care for our region to connect the population to those services.
“These graduates will be leaders in their countries and drive the improvement of aeromedical retrieval services and patient outcomes in the Pacific, where the standards are evolving.”
Alongside the master’s degree, CDU’s Graduate Certificate of Aeromedical Retrieval is also helping to shape the future of emergency medicine, with 23 students graduating in 2024 including two RFDS Flight Nurses.
With CDU set to open the NT’s first locally run undergraduate medical school next year, Professor Stephens said the university’s partnership with the RFDS will remain integral.
“It’s just grown from strength to strength since we’ve started,” she said.
“We’re starting a new undergraduate medical program and oral health program. Students in those programs will really benefit from the partnership with the RFDS and being able to experience the retrieval space – going out and bringing patients back, but also providing services in the bush."
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