The Royal Flying Doctor Service (RFDS) plans to deal a blow to chronic pain in South Australia's vast outback, which may impact more than half of isolated patients.
The service has announced it is hiring its first physiotherapist, who will be based in Port Augusta and regularly fly out to outback communities such as Oodnadatta, Marree, Andamooka and Marla from mid-2023.
RFDS primary health care manager Mandy Smallacombe said many patients in the outback struggled with chronic pain.
"When we look at our data we would have at least 55 per cent of people with some sort of diagnosis of musculoskeletal as a reason for the visit," she said.
"People are very resilient and they’ve learnt to just live with pain for long periods of time, but now we can provide a physiotherapist to ease chronic pain to 55 per cent of our cohort."
Reducing need for lengthy travel
The RFDS provides fly-in-fly-out medical services to roughly 56,000 patients across the vast, isolated areas of South Australia and the Northern Territory.
SA Isolated Children's Parent's Association secretary Hollie Williams lives on Nilpena Station near Coober Pedy, almost 1,000 kilometres north of Adelaide.
Ms Williams said she was excited to see another specialist service making trips to the outback.
"Sometimes out here you can't see a specialist without travelling hundreds of kilometres if not more," she said.
"A service town that's only 100 kilometres away is a lot more accessible than travelling about 700 kilometres to get to Port Augusta."
Three years ago, Ms Williams needed a knee reconstruction after she fell off her motorbike. As part of her recovery she had to occasionally make the almost day-long drive to Port Augusta.
She said it would have been far easier if she could have gone to nearby Coober Pedy.
"I had to go and see somebody about that. [They were] normally in Port Augusta and on occasion Coober Pedy. So to be able to access that when you need it, keep your exercises up to date would be huge for people's recovery," she said.
Treating chronic disease
Ms Smallacombe said having a physiotherapist able to treat people in the outback would have flow-on effects to other areas of people's health.
"Chronic diseases are all interrelated, if people have a frozen shoulder or chronic back pain that will release stress hormones into their body, that will impact on their blood pressure," she said.
"If we can improve people's quality of life and decrease their pain levels that will have a positive impact on their mental health which can also bring down their blood pressure and improve their cardiovascular risk factors."
Ms Smallacombe said the move was part of a plan by RFDS to treat five of the big areas of chronic disease, rather that referring people on to specialists in other organisations.
Those areas are diabetes, respiratory issues, muscoskeletal, obesity and cardiovascular issues.
