Louise Oriti, Executive Director

As we continue to manage the increase in patients that typically comes with the cooler months, I want to thank you for your ongoing dedication to RBWH.

Short Notice Accreditation

From July 2023, new mandatory short notice accreditation assessments will be introduced as part of the accreditation scheme for all Australian hospitals and day procedure services. Short notice accreditation assessments will ensure that assessment outcomes reflect everyday practice in healthcare.

What does this mean for RBWH?

• Short notice accreditation assessments require RBWH to fully comply with the NSQHS Standards and mandatory clinical care standards, and have processes in place to demonstrate compliance at any time.

Assessors will:

• Conduct interviews with staff, patients, consumers and contractors
• Observe practice and interactions
• Review documents and records
• Review quality improvement systems.

What you need to do:

• Ensure that quality and safety is ‘business as usual’
• Comply with the standards – be aware of your role and responsibilities
• Complete regular self-assessments against the Accreditation Staff Checklists
• Ensure mandatory training, PDPs, clinical competencies and clinical scope of practice are up-to-date
• Ensure clinical audits are completed and action plans developed as required
• Know about your local quality improvement activities/projects
• Ensure Quality Improvement Boards, Data Information and WHS Boards are up-to-date.

Resources are available to assist staff with your preparation for Accreditation. Visit Accreditation | NSQHS | Safety and Implementation Service | RBWH (health.qld.gov.au)

Have Your Say survey

The Have Your Say survey was scheduled to finish today, however to allow for more staff to be involved, the closing date has been extended to next Friday 16 June. RBWH is currently sitting at a response rate of 31%, so the extension gives us some much-needed time to reach our target of 60%. For those of you who need an extra incentive, Metro North will be providing a prize to a randomly selected team who achieves a 100% response rate. Check out the dashboard to find out your team’s response rate and if you are yet to reach 100%, please encourage your colleagues to complete the survey so you can be in the running for the prize. We look forward to receiving the results from the survey so we can implement improvements at RBWH.

RBWH Foundation Giving Day

The RBWH Foundation Giving Day is this Wednesday, 14 June. Get ready for RBWH to come to life with a range of activities scheduled throughout the day including a live broadcast of Channel Seven’s Sunrise, visits from the likes of world champion boxer Jeff Horn and Brisbane Lion’s players, staff challenges, a special Giving Day Food Truck event and so much more. The funds from Giving Day will go directly back to RBWH to help fund patient care improvement initiatives and research grants, so please make sure you come down and get involved. Thanks to generous matched donors, every donation received up to and including 14 June will be doubled, including all money raised by Team Royal. I’ll see you there!

RBWH budget update

Following extensive consultation with teams across RBWH, the RBWH Finance team is currently finalising budgets for the 2024 financial year. As part of this process, the RBWH Executive Committee has met to discuss key priorities for the coming year, including strategies to manage the expected increased demand during the winter period. These plans will be communicated across service lines in the near future.

On a personal note

On a personal note, as Service Line leads, the RBWH Director of Research and Implementation and others discuss our research direction, I am reminded of the hard work, commitment and dedication that research takes. For six years I worked as a research assistant/manager for the Professor of Nursing, James Cook University where I learnt so much about the practical skills of research tools, methodology, data entry, ethics and more. However, the best learnings came from working with a highly skilled mental health professor administering the research tools with pregnant and postpartum women. The opportunity for these women to talk at length about their feelings and experience taught me that research can give so much to the participant as well. So as RBWH clinical leaders plan to evolve and strengthen research and our research culture, I am excited about what this means for the patients that may be involved, but even more so for the patients whose treatment or care may be improved as a direct result of the research undertaken.

A key goal of Giving Day is to raise funds for research, so I encourage you to think of the outcomes for patients and opportunities to grow research and researchers as we contribute to raising funds.

Kind regards,

Louise.