They have been flipped upside down, blindfolded and experienced a simulated crash in the middle of the night – all to become an RACQ LifeFlight Rescue Critical Care Doctor.

There are 26 new graduates from LifeFlight Australia’s specialist training academy in Brisbane, set to join aeromedical crews across the state.

While some of the latest recruits have come from overseas to join LifeFlight’s world-renowned medical retrieval service, others are from local communities.

Dr Tom Johnson is one of seven highly-skilled doctors to join the team based at the Brisbane Airport.

Dr Johnson said saving his first life when he was just 16 inspired him to follow the path of medicine.

“It was already on my radar but I think it solidified something for me,” he said.

“My friend was just doing laps under the water trying to see how many he could do.

“I noticed he was not on the surface after a period of time, so he’d obviously passed out holding his breath. I effectively had to pull him out of the deep end and do what I thought was CPR.

“Fortunately he did very well, and he regained consciousness after a couple of minutes.”

It’s Dr Johnson’s first time working in retrieval medicine, and he’s excited to experience a pre-hospital environment on board a rescue helicopter.

“I’ve thought about doing it for a few years now having known a few colleagues who have rotated through LifeFlight at various bases up and down the coast and always heard really positive things. As soon as I found out that it was a possible avenue through emergency training, I was interested,” he said.

“I like to travel as much as possible and retrieval medicine opened up opportunities for me to try different places and different bases.”

The new recruits come from varied medical backgrounds, but all share the same goal of providing the best care possible to patients in regional and rural areas.

Dr Armela Khorassani trained in Sweden to be an anesthesiologist and intensive medicine doctor and was told that if she wanted to experience retrieval medicine, she had to do it in Australia.

“My colleagues said if I really wanted to try it, I should come to Australia and that’s why I’m here,” she said.

“In Sweden everything is done by road, sometimes by air. But the air ambulance here is so much more developed. So, if you really want to try it and work with it, and they have a good established routine and everything, you want to do it at a place like this.”

Dr Khorassani will work on board Townsville’s RACQ LifeFlight Rescue Air Ambulance jet and the AW139 Queensland Government Air (QGAir) helicopter.

The new retrieval registrars were required to complete a week of intensive aeromedical training at the LifeFlight Training Academy, including Helicopter Underwater Escape Training (HUET) and rescue winching.

LifeFlight HUET Manager Mick Dowling said in the unlikely event a helicopter crashed into water, it was vital the new doctors had the skills required to escape to safety.

“If the occupants have been trained in HUET, they have life skills and an instinctive skillset that they can put into play to get themselves out,” he said.

“In most cases occupants will survive the impact initially. It’s when the aircraft is underwater, they’re getting disoriented with the water, and it’s all about giving the skills to exit the aircraft using references, so the whole time they know exactly where they are in that machine.”

With HUET under their belts, the doctors took to the sky for winch training.

LifeFlight Chief Aircrew Officer Matt O’Rourke, said the intensive training exercises gave doctors specialist life-saving skills needed to reach patients who may be inaccessible by road or foot.

“We take them through a range of different winch scenarios; single winch, double winch, stretcher winch, of which they may utilise once in the field,” he said.

“The scenarios are very much tailored to the base they would be at. So that can be over land, they may be winching 100 feet to a motorbike accident, it could be 250 feet into a ravine, to ocean tasks which may be to a large container vessel, a passenger cruise ship where we have a critical patient, or an injured patient and they need to retrieve them back into the aircraft.”

The new recruits also put their pre-hospital clinical skills to the test at the Queensland Combined Emergency Services Academy at Whyte Island in Brisbane, where they participated in several high-pressure scenarios.

Each simulation was designed to mimic a real-life, worst-case scenario the doctors may be confronted with, such as a multi-casualty car crash, a house party incident involving a child and even a boating disaster.

The doctors will be deployed to RACQ LifeFlight Rescue helicopter and Air Ambulance jet bases across Queensland, with some assigned to other aeromedical services.

LifeFlight’s fleet of four Air Ambulance jets and nine rotary wing aircraft operates from eight Queensland bases and is available 24 hours a day, 365 days a year, directly servicing an area of 1.85 million square kilometres. It supports search and rescue efforts across 53 million square kilometres of land and sea for the Australian Maritime Safety Authority.

RACQ LifeFlight Rescue and LifeFlight SGAS helicopters, Air Ambulance jets, Critical Care Doctors, Flight Nurses and Flight Paramedics helped 7455 people in 2023 – a 15 per cent increase on the previous year.

The majority of the RACQ LifeFlight Rescue Critical Care Doctors’ work is performed on behalf of Queensland Health, tasked by Retrieval Services Queensland, within Queensland Ambulance Service.