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The Royal Flying Doctor Service of Australia (RFDS, informally known as The Flying Doctors) is an air ambulance service for those living in the remote inland areas of Australia. It is a not-for-profit organization which provides both emergency assistance and primary health care to people who cannot easily access a hospital or general practice due to the prohibitive distances of the Outback. The Service also assists with distance education.1 A "Mantle of Safety" for the Outback
The Service began in 1928, originally as an experiment known as the Aerial Medical Service (AMS) which was to run for a single year. This experiment was based in Cloncurry, Queensland. It was formed by Reverend John Flynn, the first Superintendent of the Australian Inland Mission (AIM), a branch of the Presbyterian Church.
Flynn's missionary work involved the establishment of hospitals in bush communities. This, however, did not help those who lived far from any major community. In his public speaking he would often retell the tragic circumstances that had befallen several bush settlers. The fate of Jimmy Darcy was one of these stories.
- Darcy was a stockman in Western Australia. After being found injured by some friends, he was transported over 30 miles (12 hours), to the nearest town, Halls Creek . Here, Darcy was met by FW Tuckett, the Postmaster, and the only man in the settlement trained in first aid. Tuckett said there was nothing he could reliably do for injuries so serious, and tried unsuccessfully to contact doctors at Wyndham, and then Derby , by telegraph. He eventually got through to a doctor in PerthPerth is the name of several towns and cities: Perth, Scotland is the original Perth, after which the others are named, and the administrative town of the region of Perth and Kinross in Scotland. In Australia: Perth, the State capital city of Western Aust. Through communication by morse codeMorse code is a system of representing letters, numbers and punctuation marks by means of a code signal sent intermittently. It was developed by Samuel Morse and Alfred Vail in 1835. Morse code is an early form of digital communication; however, unlike mo, Dr Holland guided Tuckett through two rather messy bladder operations utilising the only sharp instrument available, a pen knife . Holland then travelled 10 days to Halls Gap on a boat for cattle transport, a Model T Ford, a horse drawn carriage , and even on foot, only to find that Darcy had died the day before. To rub salt in the wound, the operations had been successful, but the stockman had died from an undiagnosed case of malariaMalaria ( Italian: bad air ; formerly called ague or marsh fever in English) is an infectious disease which causes about 500 million infections and 2 million deaths annually, mainly in the tropics and sub-Saharan Africa. The protozoan cause of malaria was and ruptured abscessAn abscess is a collection of pus collected in a cavity formed by the tissue on the basis of an infectious process (usually caused by bacteria or parasites) or other foreign materials (e. bullet wounds). It is a defensive reaction of the tissue to prevent in his appendixThe word appendix refers to the following things: In publishing, an appendix is a short section at the end of a book, often used for supplementary information. The literary plural is usually appendices''. In human anatomy, appendix is an abbreviation of v.
It was from stories such as this that Flynn, and his following at the AIM, became inspired to develop a route of communications that could solve the problem of remoteness. However, no feasible technology seemed apparent.
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