Flying right into health

Physiotherapist and commercial pilot Kennedy Lay has combined his two passions to create a business which takes allied health into the regions and has just made him a 40under40 award winner.

By Ara Jansen

What happens when you start your career and less than a handful of years in, feel burnt out and ready to try something else? It’s not easy to find something else you love just as much and are just as passionate about.

Kennedy Lay had a successful career as a physiotherapist, but like a lot of his colleagues, was burnt out and felt stagnant before he hit 30 and wondered what might come next.

“I was seeing about 60-70 patients a week,” says Kennedy, who found himself wanting to take a career sabbatical.

Born in Hong Kong, Kennedy moved to Melbourne when he was 13 and did his masters of physiotherapy at La Trobe University.

As he was feeling burnt out, generally just over it and wrestling with a lack of career progression, the 29-year-old started remembering a Hong Kong television series he loved as a teen called Triumph in the Skies screening in the early 2000s. It was a drama about the lives of pilots working for the fictional Solar Airways, which was based on Cathy Pacific Airways.

“One of the characters had a long distance romance with a girl in Rome,” he recalls. “That was a big deal in my head when I was young and I always wanted to be a pilot in some form or other.

“After four years of work as a physio I decided I wanted to pursue another pathway.”

He applied for flight school with Qantas in Queensland and after a series of tests, was accepted. It was a lot more work than he thought after his Triumph in the Skies romantic notions of flying collided with reality. While training to fly large commercial jets, Kennedy didn’t find a lot of magic in the way a commercial plane operated mostly on autopilot. But he still came away with a commercial pilots’ licence.

In a fortuitous conversation, one of Kennedy’s physio patients owned a sizable regional airline. When they were talking about what he might do next, the client suggested Kennedy combine his two loves –flying and physiotherapy. It planted a seed and Kennedy started looking around for a problem or a need he might be able to solve using flying and physio.

After lots of research and business planning, 15 months ago, Kennedy founded Fly2Health Group, which flies allied health practitioners into rural and remote towns in small planes. Those practitioners work in areas such as physiotherapy, speech therapy, occupational therapy and psychology. They specialise in on-the-ground assessment and therapy but also have telehealth services.

Part of the Fly2Health business model is that staff fly out of Perth in the morning and return in the evening, which helps with retention.

Kennedy started with one light plane and seeing patients as a physio one day a week, while continuing to work in a clinic. Now there’s 50 staff and five planes ferrying people around the state on regular rotation across about 23 stops that include Albany, Kalgoorlie, Wiluna, Tjuntjuntjara and Carnarvon. There are more than 150 people on the list waiting to be seen and the highest area of demand is working with children with developmental barriers such continued on Page 17