Nexus系列 3：Flying Doctor 空中医生

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REPORTER: For over 60 years, the Flying Doctor Service has brought health care to remote Australia. Once a month, the residents of outback properties drive or fly to their nearest airstrip for clinic day. For many families, the nearest alternative medical help might be hundreds of kilometres away. While the Flying Doctors are known to most urban Australians for their emergency airlifts, the clinics are the way most bush people get to know them.
DOCTOR: Probably the most challenging would be the remote Aboriginal communities where we see people in the aeroplane and try and provide optimal care and organise the things that we feel should happen for them, and that is often not easy in that setting.
PILOT: The Flying Doctor is a 'go anywhere any time' organisation. It may mean taking off into a pitch-black night out to an airstrip that's located in the middle of nowhere and then land with the help of flares and, on landing, then have to attend to the medical crisis that awaits us there. A lot of the climatic conditions affect our operations. Strong winds produce dust storms as so forth. Visibility can be quite reduced in dust. It's almost like fog. You need to think about what you're doing because you can actually taxi into your own dust and that causes damage to the engine.
NURSE: I've worked in outback areas for the last seven years and I haven't lost that sort of sense of romance, and I think it's to do with the sorts of areas that we fly into. Just seeing sandhills and the colour of the sky and flying at six o'clock in the morning and watching the sun come up. And the noise of the plane. And you feel that excitement when you get off the plane when there's lots of people standing around and that they're glad that you're there and the plane's so big and your uniforms are impressive. So you do still feel that excitement, yeah.
PARAMEDIC: The sort of emergencies we encounter here in this environment - various problems encountered by people climbing in those environments unprepared and not to mention the normal road trauma and various other medical emergencies that we encounter that would be encountered in other ambulance services in other places but exacerbated by our remoteness here at Yulara.
NURSE 2: The conditions that we work under can be pretty trying, where...the elements with the weather. The heat is sometimes absolutely incredible. The turbulence can be absolutely horrendous. You...you can't actually do anything hardly for the patient, except strap yourself in. And them - they obviously get very frightened so we have to be able to relieve and reassure them, which is a bit difficult when the plane's bucking and rolling around the sky.
WOMAN: Jesse would not be alive today if we'd had to drive out. It would've taken us 12 hours just to get to Glendambo, let alone Adelaide, and she would not have lived. And there's countless times you get situations where you would not have done nearly as well if you'd had to try and drive out. They're our GP and we couldn't manage without them.
MAN: The RFDS is a lifeline to most people in the outback. I don't think anyone could ever survive without having the Royal Flying Doctor Service available. The first thing we ever did at Kings Creek was put an airstrip in. We've faced a lot of emergencies - spider bites to motorcar roll-overs to asthma attacks to heat exhaustion, gunshot wounds. And the worst ones, I would say, would be vehicle roll-overs.
COORDINATOR: Our job is to handle the emergencies, coordinate the aircraft, arrange for the crew to come out, strip checks, fuel... Basically, we're the person that puts it all together.
And we have two injured patients and a mother as a sitter accompanying a child...
The most significant emergency to me was a few years ago and it was on the Eyre Highway in the Nullarbor. And a support vehicle with cyclists got hit from behind and there were 17 people injured. We had to get aircraft from four different bases, we had the road cut off, we turned the service station into, basically, a mini hospital. It was a very long night, lots of phone calls. It was just one of those things I will never forget.
MANAGER: Yeah, the staff at the base here in Alice Springs carries out the function of coordination and communication for our aero-medical operation as well as our aviation operation for Central Australia, which covers about a million square kilometres. And in conjunction with that facility, we have our fundraising side of our operation through our tourist facility here which is catering for about 85,000 visitors a year.
PILOT: We evacuated nearly 900 patients in the last financial year and I think we had about 28,500 patient contacts.
REPORTER: The Flying Doctors are supported by State and Federal governments and public subscriptions in roughly equal proportions. There are no charges for the service. As long as there's a stretch of dirt to land on, day or night, the Flying Doctors are on call. Their dedication and hard work is legendary in the bush. They're an aspect of outback Australian life that's justly famous all over the world.
原始来源：http://australianetwork.com/nexus/default.htm

[ 本帖最后由 pinxinge 于 21-8-2010 01:18 编辑 ]

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***Vocabulary***
airstrip：跑道
airlifts 空运
bush people 丛林生活的人们
in that setting 在那样的环境中
pitch-black night 漆黑的夜晚
flares：a bright but unsteady light or flame that does not last long
taxi：（飞机在地面）滑行
paramedic: a person whose job is to help people who are sick or injured, but who is not a doctor or a nurse 护理人员；医务辅助人员
road trauma: 交通事故伤害
exacerbate：使恶化，使加重
bucking：猛然震荡；猛烈颠簸
GP：a doctor who is trained in general medicine and who works in the local community, not in a hospital 社区医生
RFDS：Royal Flying Doctor Service
asthma：哮喘
vehicle roll-overs： 翻车
fundraising 筹款
evacuate: to move people from a place of danger to a safer place
public subscription 公共捐助