But many items on the RFDS Tasmania agenda are planted firmly on the ground.

A new facility, improving primary health outcomes, a mobile care program, and continuing to promote education are all priorities for the service in 2017. 

The RFDS has leased a sizable space next to its base near the Launceston Airport. 

Refurbishment of the space, previously an airport maintenance services site, will commence next week.

The space will eventually house RFDS primary healthcare, dental and mobile patient care services. 

The RFDS will implement a new mobile service which will allow non-emergency patients to be transported in regional areas, having just acquired two new vehicles to facilitate the service. 

It will be given its “slow start” next week while logistics are figured out. 

There could be scope for the RDFS to expand the mobile patient care service, operated by RFDS road transport officers, in the future. 

Improving its youth education program to reinforce preventative health messages to school-aged children is also on the agenda. 

“An ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure, the trouble is, the focus is always … on the acute end,” RFDS Tasmania chief executive John Kirwan said. 

The RFDS will begin facilitating a federally-funded national dental health care program in March, an area which the RFDS already focuses on.

Mr Kirwan said dental care was “core” to the RFDS, as dental care could be difficult to afford. 

As a provider under the new rural health program, tendered by Primary Health Tasmania, the RFDS will look to improve chronic disease outcomes.

He said the service looked at working with rural local governments and health workers to build “local capacity” to deal with chronic disease management. 

“We think that works well with our mobile patient care, our mobile dental care,” Mr Kirwan said. 

“Generally the further you get from a big regional centre and certainly a capital city, the worse the health outcomes are,” he said. 

“In effect, [the rural program] is a primary care model, it’s about chronic disease management, prevention, promotion, hospital avoidance and delay, and managing people in the community as much as possible.”

Mr Kirwan said community expectations had changed, so access to in-home, out-of-hospital-care was increasingly in demand.

But accessing this could be difficult in Tasmania, due to the dispersed regional population, he said.