The Government must mobilise the military to transport medical staff and patients around Australia as cuts to transport links create new challenges for already-stretched remote health services, rural doctors say.

John Hall, president of the Rural Doctors Association of Australia (RDAA), said country areas already relied heavily on fly-in, fly-out healthcare workers and he was "gravely concerned" about the impact of travel restrictions and cuts to commercial regional flights.

"We know that there are exemptions [from travel restrictions] for healthcare workers who are travelling, but we've seen Qantas and Rex cutting back on flights, so there will be a need for charter or military flights when the surge of COVID-19 cases hits," Dr Hall told the ABC.

He said extra flights would be needed to ferry in reserve medical workers and to transport out patients who will need care elsewhere.

John Hall said there were not enough medical aircraft to transport everyone in regional Australia who would need it. ( Supplied: Rural Doctors Association of Australia )

"One of our major concerns is currently rural Australians who become critically unwell rely on retrieval services like the Royal Flying Doctor Service, fixed-wing aircraft and helicopters to bring them into city ICUs [intensive care units] and regional ICUs," he said.

"In the context of COVID-19, we know that regional hospitals are going to be overwhelmed and that there will not be enough planes or helicopters to retrieve all of the people that are waiting in rural Australia who become seriously unwell.

"So we are calling on the Government to enable military assets to be deployed so that they could be part of that retrieval solution."

The RDAA says back-up health teams will also need to be deployed.

"There are some towns that still only have one doctor and you can imagine if that doctor becomes unwell themselves and they have to isolate then you've got a town without a doctor," Dr Hall said.

"Many of the doctors in the local workforce are older doctors and are choosing to opt out [of front-line service] because … they're in a really high-risk group for becoming seriously unwell or possibly a fatality."

Larger regional centres with intensive care facilities will also need extra help, including replacement workers if staff contract the virus or need to be quarantined.

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There is no national data on the number of COVID-19 cases in regional areas and its spread, but Dr Hall said it was only a matter of time before it "penetrates deep into rural Australia".

Michael Kidd, the principal medical adviser to the federal Department of Health, said he would meet with rural doctors' organisations on Tuesday to discuss their concerns.

"There is wonderful work that's taking place right across the country with groups of doctors coming together, knowing, perhaps, that in this town there's a vulnerable doctor that needs to be doing telehealth, [they are discussing] how can the doctors in nearby towns assist the patients of that doctors," Dr Kidd said.

"I am heartened to see how my colleagues are coming together at this time of crisis."

Fever clinic for remote Queensland

Doctors in the Queensland town of Emerald, 800 kilometres north-west of Brisbane, are rushing to stay ahead of the curve.

In a matter of just days, the Emerald Medical Group has built a coronavirus respiratory and fever clinic, which it plans to have equipped and running by the end of the week.

Doctor Ewen McPhee spoke to the ABC as he was overseeing the last of the building works. ( Supplied: Emerald Medical Group )

"If we are complacent, if we wait for COVID-19 to rear its head in these rural communities, it'll be too late, simply too late," the clinic's Ewen McPhee said.

The Federal Government recently announced it would fund 100 coronavirus clinics. Most are attached to hospitals, but the Emerald clinic is being established and run by local GPs.

The clinic, the first of its kind in regional Australia, is a series of dongas linked together by walkways and will be run by staff in full personal protective equipment.

The aim is to keep anyone who thinks they may have the virus separate from other general practice patients, and also to stop them from presenting at — and clogging up — the local hospital's emergency department, Dr McPhee said.

Patients will be assessed and those who are well enough will be told to self-isolate, while those who are sick will be hospitalised.

"We've got the opportunity to put this in place now, get the systems and processes running well, so that staff know what to do [and] also people get used to the fact that this is the way we're going to be doing business for the next six to 12 months."

The clinic will be staffed by workers from Central Highlands Healthcare.

But its acting CEO Renee Barlow said her staff were already working at capacity.

"Even on the best of days, we have long waitlists of patients waiting to see the doctor," Ms Barlow said.

"So there's already a lot of nervousness about how our patients are going to get through to the doctors."

Remote towns could 'suffer disproportionately worse'

Hamish Meldrum, a co-founder of Ochre Medical Services that provides locum medical staff to rural Australia, said remote areas were particularly threatened by the virus.

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"They have disadvantaged populations that, you know, if COVID-19 got into those populations it may travel through those populations faster," Dr Meldrum said.

"They have populations with more health needs and more co-morbidities. So it is likely that their populations might suffer disproportionately worse than healthier populations.

"And I think they have the right to be quite concerned."

Dr McPhee, who is also the president of the Australian College of Rural and Remote Medicine, said it was a nerve-wracking and anxious time for staff, who knew they were "on the frontline".

"To be honest, these people I work with, I am in awe of them because not one of them, not one of them, is stepping back," he said.

"These are the people who pick up the phone, these are people who are working part-time as nurses and have got families of their own, these are people who are not stepping back."