Martin Byrne Director of Medical Services
The last few months have been a whirlwind of COVID and floods, as well as Christmas, school holidays and further expansions at STARS. The medical teams have responded well and been working tirelessly throughout this period to continue to provide elective surgery.
Our rehabilitation and geriatric wards are constantly full and provided support to other Metro North units while the COVID surge was managed – well done to all! We continue to provide these services with our engaged junior medical staff, who are setting a benchmark in Metro North with more than 95 per cent discharge summaries being sent to GPs and patients in less than 48 hours – I think this is actually the best in the state!
Our MET service has now responded to more than 170 MET calls since opening in early 2021. This service is provided 24 hours a day and continues to provide rapid, safe and urgent care to all patients, staff and visitors to STARS. We have transferred approximately 70 patients to Royal Brisbane and Women’s Hospital but managed the rest of these emergencies here at STARS with excellent outcomes. Many of these metrics and others are available on the STARS website under Safety and Quality QHEPS page.
Our medical services team includes safety and quality, health information and pharmacy. These teams are ever present throughout the hospital and interact with every service every day. Our safety and quality team supported all services to prepare for our accreditation visit in March. We have been getting great feedback about the outstanding clinical service we all provide here at STARS.
Our health information team is focused on ensuring that our services are supported, recorded and counted to get the best activity we can. All staff have a role to play in information management and optimisation, and our health information team can support and develop improvements across the service.
And finally, our friendly pharmacy team continue to provide and excellent inpatient and outpatient service and are leading Metro North with programs such as the Better Together Medication Access program, which provides timely and free medication to our Indigenous patients.
Martin Byrne
Director of Medical Services