Meet Northern Health’s newest Aboriginal Hospital Liaison Officer, Jordan Casey.

With the Aboriginal population growing in the northern suburbs, it was important for Northern Health to employ another Hospital Liaison Officer to maintain quality support services for the community.

Emiliano Zucchi, Manager Transcultural & Language Services | Aboriginal Support Unit, says, “we realised the Aboriginal population in our catchment area was growing faster than any other group, and there was more demand for our services than we could meet”.

Jordan’s passion for Aboriginal health and culture started to grow five years ago when he got involved in the community health sector in Sunbury.

“It really fuelled my drive to want to help and contribute in the health sector,” he said.

His new role allows him to provide emotional and cultural support to Aboriginal patients at Northern Health.

“We make sure they’re getting culturally safe care whilst in the hospital. We also provide some follow-up care as well, especially if it’s regarding home and community care.”

A typical day for Jordan consists of seeing Aboriginal patients in the Emergency Department, Short Stay and Wards, to ensure they’re getting culturally appropriate care, as well as providing secondary consult to staff members at Northern Health that are engaging with Aboriginal patients.

Jordan has been working at Northern Health for one month now and he already recognises how his new role can improve the overall patient experience.

“The most rewarding part of my role here at Northern is seeing the positive impact we can have on our patients and their families,” he said.

This year marks a major milestone for Northern Health Home Care Packages (NHHCP).

The program will be celebrating their 30 year anniversary of providing in-home support to older people and people with disabilities, with the aim of assisting them to remain in their homes and chosen community for as long as possible.

It all began in 1988, when NHHCP were called the Bundoora Community Care Program, located at what was previously named Bundoora Extended Care Centre.

The program was a trial funded by State and Federal Governments to assist people at home, rather than having to enter residential care prematurely. This was the beginning of the ‘Linkages’ program.

Initially, the program had 74 Linkages packages and later became a part of Northern Health, when it was established in 2000. Since then, Northern Health has been dedicated to providing quality case management and services to improve people’s quality of life and overall wellness at home.

By 2014, the program included 185 Linkages Packages, 77 Community Aged Care Packages (CACP) and 41 Extended Aged Care at Home Packages (EACH). CACP and EACH packages were eventually renamed as what we now go by, Home Care Packages, as part of the Australian Government ‘living longer, living better’ aged care reforms.

Julie Williams, Manager Northern Health Home Care Packages, says the program has grown by over 70%, to include a total of 202 Home Care Packages with 26 staff.

“It’s quite an achievement, as we were one of the original pilot programs,” she said.

Quarterly Staff Recognition Awards

Northern Health is introducing a new Quarterly Staff Recognition Awards program designed to formally recognise outstanding contributions by our employees and celebrate staff excellence. The Quarterly Recognition Awards will be an opportunity for us to reward teams and individuals in a wide range of areas, who have demonstrated commitment to high quality outcomes.

Categories will cover exceptional patient experience, compassionate care, safety improvement, innovation and potential to grow and develop at Northern Health.  An “Above and Beyond” category will also be awarded. The Awards will be jointly conducted by People and Culture and Public Affairs with sponsorship from BankVic and Maxxia.

I encourage staff to nominate their colleagues for their achievements at Northern Health and celebrating success and commitment to our patients and each other. Entries are now open and you can nominate here.

Trusted Care

Bill Shearer, our Executive Director, Executive Director Transformation Quality & Safety, is leading our work to becoming a High Reliability Organisation (HRO). This is a three year journey where we advance our commitment of delivering trusted care to our community. All staff are encouraged to become involved in this journey. You can find out more about HRO and Trusted Care in the guest iNews column this week.

Hope you all have a great week ahead.

Siva Sivarajah

Chief Executive

High Reliability Organisations are those which maintain a high level of safety in dangerous and complex environments.  In 2017, Northern Health began a journey towards becoming a High Reliability Organisation in partnership with Johns Hopkins Health. This has allowed us to learn from the experience of one of the top three hospitals in the world and adapt that experience and knowledge for Northern Health.

Through this partnership, we are able to examine the way we currently work through the lens of High Reliability, which has led  us to design and begin to implement significant and sometimes dramatic changes.  These changes have been built around the concept of delivering trusted care to our community.

We understand that trusted care is safe, patient-centred, clinically excellent and operationally efficient care. This care is delivered by high functioning teams in an organisation which has a culture that fosters trust both within the health service and from the community we serve.

Johns Hopkins has described some basic tools for delivering High Reliability in healthcare, including the deployment of Comprehensive Unit Based Safety Programs to maximise the safety of our patients, and the use of Clinical Communities to solve the most complex and difficult of clinical problems. We have adapted and extended these to include the concept of the enabled healthcare worker.

The enabled healthcare worker is everyone of us. This healthcare worker has knowledge about safety in hospitals and the workplace, knows how to talk to patients with respect and kindness and is passionate about investigating new ways of improving healthcare.

We are all capable of being a champion of safety.

Over the coming weeks and months, you will hear about the projects we are commencing and how you can become involved.

Bill Shearer

Executive Director, Executive Director Transformation Quality & Safety

Foundation’s Audi raffle ticket sale is in full swing, with our staff members making sure not to miss out on the opportunity to win the fabulous sporty A1 looking for a new place to call home.

Basil Ireland, our CFO, bought ticket no. 37 this year, inspired by the efforts the Foundation is putting into raising funds for our Paediatric High Dependency Unit.

“This is a great chance for our staff to win a car – one in 750, better than most odds you get. The money is going to a great cause and it’s definitely worth buying the ticket,” he says.

We were wondering what Basil would do in case he won, and he shared with us that he’d definitely keep the car and drive to work in it.

If you’d also like to drive to work in an A1 Sportsback, be sure to grab your lucky ticket from our dedicated volunteers in the Northern Hospital foyer or just click here.

And if you’ve already bought a ticket and would like to share your story, contact us.

 

 

 

Northern Health is celebrating Women’s Health Week by holding a fabulous event for its female staff and women from Melbourne’s northern suburbs, with the aim to empower women and improve their health.

Women’s Health Week will be held from 3-7 September 2018 at Northern Hospital Foyer, with the drop-in sessions running from 8.30-9am, 10-11am and 1-2pm. This is a great opportunity to discuss different aspects of women’s health with a Northern Health professional, get essential information and advice, and take a proactive approach towards health.

Cheryl Murray, Breast Care Nurse Consultant at Northern says that women are usually are busy juggling family, work and day to day duties, and a lot of the time they put everyone else’s needs first. Time is quite often the enemy for women when it comes down to maintaining their health, with women often forgetting about themselves and more often than not only seeing a doctor when something goes wrong.

“It is crucial for women to look after themselves mentally and physically and that starts as early as vaccinations. Knowing your body and what is normal and abnormal is great, knowing what to do if there is a problem. Taking advantage of the community programs like Breast Screening, vaccination programs, cervical screening and bowel cancer screening is essential to be healthy and to live a long and happy life,” she says.

Cheryl also points out that prevention is one of the keys to good health. In cases where women are facing a health issue, getting on top of it early can make all the difference, particularly if it is a potential life threatening scenario.

We encourage you to have a look at the topics covered during each session and be sure to drop in at the foyer for a chat.

It’s free, informative and can be life-changing.

 

From 10 – 13 September, Northern Health will be holding a week of ‘Conversations on Mental Wellness’ as part of our Psychological Wellbeing Strategy.

The program focuses on three main areas; protection, prevention and intervention, as an initiative to protect the mental health of Northern Health staff, promote wellbeing, and intervene to address mental health concerns.

World Suicide Prevention Day will mark the start of the program on Monday 10 September, with Layne Stretton from Roses in the Ocean speaking about the impact suicide can have on families and communities, and the signs to look out for.

Speakers and sessions will run until R U OK? Day to close the program on Thursday 13 September.

The objective of these events is to showcase Northern Health’s commitment to a psychologically safe workplace, and provide tangible steps towards a number of actions, including raising awareness, combating stigma, suicide prevention and promoting positive mental health.

One of the featured speakers, Northern Health Pastoral Care Coordinator, David Paterson, describes conversations on mental wellness as “openness to asking the question about how someone else is doing and openness to giving an honest answer.”

“When someone asks how you are, instead of the trite answer, ‘fine how are you?’, stop, pause and reflect on how you are really. Are you tired, sad, depressed, happy, flat or simply don’t know?”

Molly Galea (pictured), Northern Health Allied Health Education Lead, will be speaking on how great teams make great workplaces. She says her session will be an interactive, active and playful look at how you can contribute to creating a mentally healthy workplace.

So what does mental wellness mean to Molly?

“It means I am happy with where I am in my life, and who I have around me. It’s feeling I’m contributing to the world and my community, knowing that I have the emotional resources to come through adversity and times of trouble.”

“Every interaction we have promotes or detracts from others’ mental health. It is our network of identities that make us who we are. A web of identities means that if one fails, we have a whole bunch of other identities to catch us,” she said.

To start the conversation, please click here.

Northern Health’s research team has just become stronger, having Mark Tacey, Biostatistician returning to work for us. Mark had spent two years with Northern Health in the past, then moved to Monash University and decided to come back and work on exciting projects with Northern’s researchers.

“I’ve chosen Northern because it’s a great research community. I enjoy helping people here and seeing their research go all the way to publication. I am also involved in a couple of quality improvement projects and I enjoy seeing how that helps with good patient outcomes,” Mark says.

Mark is a biostatistician available to provide statistical analysis support for staff on their projects conducted at Northern Health.  If you are working on research, Mark strongly recommends coming to him first before you start.

“I can assist with anything from sample size calculations to presentation of data. The importance of coming to me early in the project is that researchers make sure they get the study design and sample size accurate, and that will help them achieve their research goals,” he says. 

With research projects, having the right things done at the right time is essential.

“It’s crucial that they don’t go through the whole project phase, get to the end and then realise they don’t have enough sample size or they’ve conducted the analysis in a slightly incorrect way,” Mark says.

Mark will be providing training courses relating to clinical research study design, sample size estimation, clinical data collection and an introduction to statistical analysis, which will be advertised over the coming months.

Mark is available for consultation on Wednesday, Thursday and Friday each week. He can be contacted on (03) 8468 0742 or at mark.tacey@nh.org.au, and is located in the Office of Research on Level 3 of the NCHER building.

Northern Health’s Research Week will be held from 8-12 October 2018.