Words from Russell 15 December 2021

It’s been a big year 2021 – but then again, if it wasn’t, it wouldn’t be Western Health. If it were not so big I am sure we’d all wonder what happened!

Australia’s best healthcare team – yes that is all of you – have performed again far above the call of duty once more to support each other and community. There are some days when I don’t know how you did it, but you did. For that and for the best care that you provide for our patients every day, frequently under trying circumstances – a massive THANK YOU.

I am sure many of you will be catching up this Christmas with family and friends you haven’t seen for a while and I hope you enjoy these reunions, however sadly not to see family in WA – well not yet but it is not too far away.

With the need for us to be as prepared as possible for what might come our way this year, I know there are many staff who have not been able to take the leave they had hoped to – I know I am one of them. Please know that I appreciate this and we trying to make sure that you do have that opportunity for a break as soon as possible. Everyone deserves a chance to take time to wind down.

I hope some of you have run into the donuts in the past day – rumour has it that they made an appearance across our sites as part of the festivities and celebrations. The Christmas trees are up now and a range of other activities are planned. Apparently there are some strong contenders for the Christmas decorations competition again too!

A reminder that we have the fantastic Des and Dave for Westerly’s Lunchtime Laughs this Friday at midday – this is a new session of their funny riff on “Grab a Tissue, We have an Issue” with new Christmas-themed questions they will attempt to answer.

I realise that many, many staff cannot watch these sessions live at midday on a Friday, but the sessions have been recorded, so why not get together with some of your team and do a bit of a micro-cinema showing for 20-30 minutes in some of your breaks? You could start with the absolutely hilarious Urzila Carlson’s session from Friday 10 December. I dare you to watch that and not laugh! We have been bringing these sessions to you as one small way of saying Thank you for the hard work you have done throughout 2021 and as an aim to give you some light relief.

Here are some of the latest updates for you as we approach the tail end of the year:

A bigger family this year

Well there certainly is a bigger family around the Western Health table this Christmas compared with just a year ago. An extra 2,000 new members of the team in fact. We now have more than 10,000 staff and are the fastest growing health service in the country. It has been fantastic to welcome our Bacchus Marsh, Melton & Caroline Springs colleagues to the team and with the resourcing of COVID vaccination rollouts and the new Western Public Health Unit, these are just a few of the reasons for the increased family size.

Calling in reinforcements – for Sunshine ED and for our midwifery team

We now have the funding to operationalise a much larger area of the new Sunshine ED and treat patients in our new capacity. To do that, we are needing to call in some reinforcements – a lot of reinforcements.

We have funded 95 ED scholarship positions for those who want to take on the critical care postgraduate course and have already filled many of these roles.

Our midwifery team are also needing substantial numbers of new recruits to enable us to open more birthing suites at Joan Kirner, to respond to demand and provide the resources to best support the wonderful staff who are already working with us.

This week we have also commenced a major recruitment campaign to attract several hundred additional staff for the Sunshine Hospital ED and for our midwifery teams. The campaign is headlined Frontline Careers and is linked to a newly designed, specific website.

The campaign is running nationally and internationally in a number of countries. The campaign involves a large scale digital and social media campaign, supported in Melbourne by ‘out of home’ advertising and you will start to see this appearing around places such as bus stops or roadside signs as you drive past in suburbs within our catchment. There will also be a presence on two major billboards, one on the Princes Freeway at Williams Landing and another on the Western Ring Road at Keilor Park.

I would like to ask each of you to please spread the word, share social media posts, and pass on the digital ads through your own networks. Click here to access a set of Facebook/Instagram or LinkedIn tiles you can use with your posts. Please be sure to add in the full website address – https://frontlinecareers.wh.org.au within your comments or bio as this is a new site and it makes it easier to reach it. We need to bring in many more staff to join our teams and respond to the very significant need and demand across our communities and in the interests of all of our staff, we would love to see the message get out as widely as possible. I am clearly very biased but I think Western Is the best place to work!

New Footscray Hospital Project

You might have noticed there are many cranes working busily on the New Footscray Hospital construction site as the project progresses on schedule. This Thursday you might see some TV coverage on Ch 9 of the ceremonial ‘naming of the cranes’. This is something of a tradition in major hospital builds in Melbourne at least. Two cranes will be named. One will be named after the first and renowned Director of Nursing at Footscray Hospital, Mavis Mitchell. The second crane will be named after one of our current colleagues, Hai Bui, who is a surgeon who has worked with us for many years. Hai had a very difficult path to follow to reach the point where he became a surgeon after coming to Australia as a 19 year old Vietnamese refugee.

Hot off the press – the winners of the Board Chair’s Inspire Medal!

Huge congratulations to the People and Culture team and Joe Debono on an incredibly well deserved win of the Board Chair’s Inspire Medal announced this afternoon as part of the AGM. Your team perform amazing feats in very small amounts of time and we all appreciate what you do.

I’d also like to acknowledge the other two finalists for this medal – Jason Plant, Divisional Director Peri-Op and Critical Care and the Security Services Team. I know it was a very hard decision for our Board Chair!

Webinar 21 December

Next Tuesday 21 December at 2pm, I will hold the last webinar from me for the year.

Stay safe and well.