Trusted care for the community all year round

Northern Health has had an impressive 2018-19 year!

In our rapidly growing community, we are continually improving our services and care to meet demand.

To support our increasing population, Northern Hospital’s Emergency Department (ED) treated more than 107,000 presentations, continuing on from last year as the busiest ED in the state.

We admitted 98,193 patients to hospital, performed 10,385 elective surgeries and saw 232,496 outpatients in our specialist clinics!

Our Ambulance Offload initiative has led to an increase from 78 per cent of ambulances offloaded within 40 minutes to 95 per cent in the last 12 months, and is now the best performing in Victoria. This makes ambulances more available in the community and gets patients to hospital to be cared for more quickly.

Northern Health’s elective surgery ‘time to treatment’ has improved to 97 per cent in 2018-19. Currently, 100 per cent of Category 1 and Category 3 elective surgery patients receive their care in the clinically recommended time.

In addition, there have been sustained improvements in managing patients within clinically recommended treatment times, and a reduction in the number of long waiting patients.

We have embarked on a major program strategy – ‘Staying Well’ – connecting with our community and linking them to the services they need to ensure that only those who really need hospital care end up being referred.

Partnerships have also been developed with academic and industry partners from around the globe to explore tangible ways to utilise technology in new and innovative ways to improve the patient journey through co-design with our consumers.

Northern Health Chief Executive, Siva Sivarajah, said, “Over the past 12 months, Northern Health has driven numerous quality and improvement initiatives whilst expanding reliable access to care for patients and families.”

“As we move towards new opportunities in the year ahead, we thank all our staff, volunteers, students, Board Directors, Northern Health Foundation supporters and our partners, whose contributions help us provide outstanding care for our community.”