The McKay Patrol\u00a0is a remote-area aerial padre service run by the Uniting Church of Australia, based in Cloncurry (northwest Queensland).\u00a0 It is named after the Reverend Fred McKay.\u00a0 In 1927 Fred was appointed by Reverend John Flynn to oversee the formation and operation of the aerial medical service that later become the Royal Flying Doctor Service (RFDS).\u00a0 The McKay Patrol padre continues to provide invaluable counselling and practical assistance in addition to the standard religious services relating to hatches, matches and dispatches (baptisms, weddings and funerals).<\/p>\n
The Uniting Church’s Frontier Services has padres located in other remote parts of Australia as well:<\/p>\n
I highly recommend reading the McKay Patrol monthly newsletters, which are very witty but very earthy, giving a good insight into the realities of living in remote areas.\u00a0 For example the December 2010 newsletter, which discusses two\u00a0long flights\u00a0Cloncurry-based Reverend Garry Hardingham made recently, helping out two families with medical-related travel problems.<\/p>\n
Over the last two decades or so there has been a change in the perception of the RFDS amongst remote area residents, who are not happy with the service provided by the RFDS and the perception of race discrimination (people who ring are asked their racial origins).\u00a0 It was station residents who funded the formation and growth of the RFDS, and raised hundreds of thousands of dollars through charity events,\u00a0yet many now feel they are the people least likely to receive assistance.<\/p>\n
It is difficult to know how significant the\u00a0issue is, but the perception remains that\u00a0if you are a\u00a0white person you have to be a lot sicker\u00a0or you will not be picked up and flown to a base hospital by the RFDS.\u00a0\u00a0 The aircraft used by the RFDS have become increasingly sophisticated – far more expensive to buy and maintain\u00a0but able to provide a much better service, but these newer planes\u00a0do need longer and better strips to land on than previously\u00a0(thus being not so suited to the average cattle station airstrip).\u00a0 And because of the increasing cost of\u00a0service provision, and the complications of long flights often requiring diversions to pick up other passengers for vitally needed medical help, there is little or no room for people to accompany critically ill patients.<\/p>\n
The concerns would largely be addressed if the RFDS capital and annual running costs were fully funded by state and federal governments as an essential medical service provided not just to remote area residents (of all backgrounds), but visitors to remote areas, as an equality issue.\u00a0\u00a0 The RFDS should not be in the position of having to rely on charity donations to survive.<\/p>\n
In the meantime,\u00a0lower profile organisations such as Angel Flight\u00a0and the McKay Patrol scratch around for donations each year in order to continue providing essential medical-related services that also should be fully funded by state and federal governments.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
The McKay Patrol\u00a0is a remote-area aerial padre service run by the Uniting Church of Australia, based in Cloncurry (northwest Queensland).\u00a0 It is named after the Reverend Fred McKay.\u00a0 In 1927 Fred was appointed by Reverend John Flynn to oversee the formation and operation of the aerial medical service that later become the Royal Flying Doctor […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[3,8,11,66],"tags":[82,164,179],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.fionalake.com.au\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1088"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.fionalake.com.au\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.fionalake.com.au\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.fionalake.com.au\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.fionalake.com.au\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1088"}],"version-history":[{"count":10,"href":"https:\/\/www.fionalake.com.au\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1088\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":5987,"href":"https:\/\/www.fionalake.com.au\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1088\/revisions\/5987"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.fionalake.com.au\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1088"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.fionalake.com.au\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1088"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.fionalake.com.au\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1088"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}