After an overwhelmingly positive response from attendees at Beef 2015, the Rural Doctors Association of Queensland (RDAQ) will return for a second time to perform health checks at Beef 2018.
Located at the Queensland Country Life site, RDAQ Foundation will be conducting free health checks from Tuesday to Thursday.
Dr Dan Halliday, director of RDAQ Foundation – the health promotion arm of RDAQ – said the organisation aimed to promote better health within rural communities and Beef 2018 would be the perfect opportunity to engage with people from the country.
“The design of the health checks is to do things that general practitioners would do in a normal practice, but provided in a sense that it’s at Beef Australia,” Dr Halliday said.
Dr Halliday said the health checks were just like a pit stop and he encouraged people to use the opportunity.
“People will be a bit more relaxed, might be a bit more willing to engage and have time to have a checkup,” he said.
“They’ll come in, have some screening tests done, answer a questionnaire, and what we can do is pick up any risk factors associated with their presentation at the time and we can give them some level of advice.
“We don’t have a huge amount of time to delve in deeply to any medical issues they might have.
“We don’t have any access to pathology or anything like that, but as a snapshot it can be quite powerful and we have validated tools to make recommendations.”
Realising that having healthy, sustainable families in rural areas was key to keeping the country going, Dr Halliday, based in Stanthorpe, said RDAQ Foundation was investing substantial time and money into the initiative.
“This is one of those things about making sure families in rural areas retain their vitality and continue to provide good service to their communities and their families,” he said.
RDAQ Foundation has also partnered with St John Ambulance Australia to provide at a special Beef 2018 discounted rate automated external defibrillator units, helping people on farms to survive cardiac arrest.
QCL and RDAQ Foundation are also giving visitors the chance to be on the newspaper’s ‘front page’.
Come to the QCL site to have your photo taken. You’ll be able to choose your background and your own headline, and QCL's friendly volunteers will print out your own front page to keep and show your friends.
The cost is a donation to RDAQ Foundation, helping to improve medical services across rural Queensland.
