From Fortnightly Doctor Visits To RFDS Emergencies, Gaps In Remote Healthcare for South Australia Remain
For families living in remote South Australia, healthcare isn’t close by. It can be hours away.
At Lambina Station, about 120 kilometres south of the Northern Territory border, Gillian Fennell and her husband Mark are used to handling things themselves. Like many remote families, they rely on training, experience and a well-stocked medical kit to get through.
But that isolation comes with a cost.
When Help Is Hours Away
Gillian says the health system is falling short for the people who feed the nation. When a doctor might only visit once a fortnight and help can take hours to arrive, access to care becomes the biggest challenge.
In serious situations, families rely on the Royal Flying Doctor Service, and only when they have no other choice.
When their nine-month-old daughter Eleanor developed a respiratory infection and couldn’t breathe, they had to make that call.
“That was a pretty frightening thing, waiting for the plane,” Gillian says. “We make sure we’re properly broken before we call. It’s not because we want to — it’s because we have to.”
When the Plane Doesn’t Come
But even when the call is made, help isn’t always immediate.
When a young visitor on Lambina Station was knocked off his motorbike by a kangaroo and suffered a serious leg injury, Gillian knew it was beyond what they could manage.
“I knew I couldn’t patch this one up — he needed proper medical attention,” Gillian says. “We splinted his leg on the couch and used our medical chest to carefully give him pain relief. But there’s only so much you can safely do.”
The plane, expected within an hour, didn’t arrive for four.”
Gillian, Chair of Livestock SA, has lived on Lambina Station since 2001, raising three children in one of the most remote corners of the state while producing beef for Australian families.
It’s a life she wouldn’t trade.
“Once you get north of Coober Pedy and you start to get back into the red hills and the red dirt… when you cross the grid, you’re coming home and you just feel a weight slide off your shoulders,” Gillian says. “That’s where home is. That’s what home looks like.”
The Gaps Between Visits
Beyond emergencies, it’s the everyday gaps in care that worry her most.
Locum doctors rotate through the nearest town, sometimes only visiting every couple of weeks. That lack of continuity makes it difficult to build relationships or properly understand a patient’s history.
“These are the things that keep me awake at night. These are the gaps country people are falling through when you don’t get to build a relationship with someone who understands you,” Gillian says.
When Care Is Missed
After the birth of her first child, Gillian developed post-natal depression, something only picked up because she saw the same GP multiple times through baby check-ups.
“If I hadn’t seen that GP for two or three appointments through the mother-baby care service, would it have even been picked up?” she says.
Managing ongoing health issues can be just as tough.
Finding the right medication takes time, monitoring and consistency, things that are harder to access in remote areas.
“It is a rough, rough journey,” Gillian says.
“A lot of people can’t stick at it — not because they’re failing, but because it impairs your function. You can’t just lie on the couch all day when you’ve got sheep to feed.”
Even the advice given to rural patients can miss the mark, with suggestions that don’t always reflect the realities of life in remote areas.
From Gillian’s perspective, the solutions aren’t complicated.
Fixes That Should Be Simple
Better continuity of care and improved communication during emergency retrievals would make a real difference, but Gillian says some of the biggest frustrations come down to systems that should be simple.
Claiming support through the Patient Assistance Transport Scheme (PATS), for example, can involve hours of paperwork for minimal reimbursement.
“We’re highly educated, highly literate people — and it’s still too hard,” she says. “That’s something that could be fixed overnight with the stroke of a pen.”
Ultimately, she says, the need is clear.
“The need is very, very clear,” Gillian says. “We talk about ramping in Adelaide and the answer was to build more ambulance stations. But the problem isn’t the ambulances, it’s the bottleneck getting people into hospital.
“There are doctors trained specifically for rural practice. They’re fantastic — but there aren’t enough places funded to train them.”
For those living in remote South Australia, the challenge isn’t resilience – it’s distance.
This story is part of the From Here to Healthcare campaign, a grassroots storytelling initiative led by Alex Thomas and supported by Greater SA. The campaign shares real experiences from country South Australians to show how access to healthcare changes lives and outcomes, based on postcode alone.
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