RACQ LifeFlight Rescue Critical Care welcomes new doctors to team

A group of doctors eager to lend a helping hand have been put through their paces to join RACQ LifeFlight Rescue Critical Care team.

A Sunshine Coast doctor is swapping the hospital ward for the outdoors by joining the RACQ LifeFlight Rescue Critical Care Doctors team.

Dr David MacGarty is one of 24 recruits jumping on board the rescue chopper, bringing advanced medical care to sick or injured patients.

“It’s a bit of adventure, it’s a bit of learning new skills and becoming more self-reliant as a clinician,” Dr MacGarty said.

“I’ve always liked the outdoors, so I guess this is kind of an excuse to get out to some of the locations where I like to be and also mixing that with my career, so for me it’s kind of a perfect scenario.”

The anaesthetist at the Sunshine Coast University Hospital often receives patients who have been flown by the local RACQ LifeFlight Rescue chopper.

“Normally we get the handover from the doctor coming in from LifeFlight and we hear what’s happened to get that patient to the hospital, then after that we deal with bringing them to theatre and solving whatever the problem is,” he said.

“This will give me a greater kind of context of what’s actually happening before that.”

RACQ LifeFlight Rescue chief aircrew officer Simon Gray said the doctors were trained up so they could board aeromedical helicopters and jets across Queensland.

Part of that training involves an intensive training week at the LifeFlight Training Academy to prepare them for the many challenges of retrieval medicine.

“They’re here working for us because they are very experienced doctors, they’re top of their field sort of people, but they’re here doing something they haven’t done before,”

One of the most important – and exciting – parts of training is learning how to be winched from a chopper.

“We’re introducing them to one of the methods that we can get them to a patient because at the end of the day, that’s fundamentally our main purpose – to get advanced medical care to a patient,” Mr Gray said.

Most the RACQ LifeFlight Rescue Critical Care doctors’ work is performed on behalf of Queensland Health under a 10-year service agreement.