Louise O’Riordan, Acting Executive Director

As we move ahead toward the rollout of ieMR, it’s a good time for us to take a look at how we use and record patient information.

At the next People & Culture forum, we’ll have Sarah Webster from the Metro North Ethical Standards Unit available to answer questions and talk about appropriate access to patient databases like The Viewer, EDIS, and ieMR. If you’d like an Outlook invitation to that session, click here.

You may also remember last year’s Make It Count campaign, which featured simple and practical tips for doctors and clinicians on how to improve the accuracy of clinical and patient records.  

This week, we launched the 2024 campaign, Make it Count More – with a new series of tips and suggestions to help improve patient safety and ensure we’re getting all the activity-based funding we are entitled to.

As part of Making it Count More, we’ll focus on a different tip each week until the end of the financial year.

This week’s tip:

Principal Diagnosis – Avoid documenting a symptom when there is a more specific or probable diagnosis.

Examples:

• Lower back pain vs degenerative disc disease with radiculopathy.
• RAD vs pneumonitis.
• Abdo pain vs retroperitoneal metastatic disease.

If you have any questions, talk to Health Information Services on 3883 7295.

National Apology Yarning Circle

About 50 hospital staff joined us in the Staff Courtyard on Tuesday for a yarning circle and morning tea for the anniversary of the apology.  

Elwyn Henaway yarned about why the National Apology was a significant milestone in our reconciliation journey and shared his own insights and experiences.  

We’ll be holding more yarning circles this year, where everyone in our hospital community will be invited to yarn, share, and learn from each other’s stories.

Raise it for Redcliffe Update

The date has been set for Raise It for Redcliffe’s biggest event of the year – Redcliffe Hospital Giving Day. This year, we’ll be celebrating Giving Day on Thursday 29 August. 

If you’d like to put your hand up to be involved in making this year’s Giving Day the most successful ever, click here. 

Raise it for Redcliffe Hospital began in 2021 as our philanthropic partnership with the RBWH Foundation.

Staff BBQs are back for 2024

One of the ways Redcliffe Hospital says thank you to show our appreciation is with our regular Staff BBQs. This year, we’ll be running nine BBQs for everyone to enjoy. 

 All staff, students and volunteers are invited to join us on Monday, 11 March, from 11am in the Staff Courtyard for the first BBQ of 2024.

Metro North Staff Expo

The Metro North Staff Expo is also back at Redcliffe in 2024.

The Staff Expo brings together a range of staff benefit providers, including superannuation, novated leasing, and salary packaging providers, as well as staff wellness providers like Benestar and our Redcliffe Hospital Staff Wellness Working Group and REDDY Fun & Fitness. 

The Staff Expo will be at Redcliffe in the Staff Courtyard on Tuesday 19 and Wednesday 20 March.

Red Rocket arrives at Redcliffe

You may have noticed a new addition to our hospital campus, the Caboolture Hospital patient and visitor shuttle bus, affectionately named ‘The Red Rocket’, has arrived at its new home on the peninsula.

The Red Rocket starts work at Redcliffe on Monday, helping reduce the distance that patients and visitors need to travel between the multi-storey car park and their appointments. This is particularly important for patients with appointments at the northern end of our campus following the permanent closure of the North Block car park.

The Red Rocket will run between 7.30am and 4pm on weekdays (excluding public holidays) in a loop around the campus, stopping at four designated stops, including:

• Multi-storey car park
• Hospital main entrance
• Outside the Palliative Care Unit at the northern end of the campus, and
• MBICC.

I encourage everyone to read the Shuttle Bus Fact Sheet setting out how it will work at Redcliffe, and how it will only be for patient and visitor use and will stop only at the four designated points.

The arrival of the Red Rocket at Redcliffe is a positive step to helping our patients and visitors during the expansion works.

Lastly, a reminder that as the Redcliffe Hospital expansion progresses, there will be more car park closures, which will impact the availability of parking spaces for everyone, including patients and staff. 

To help patients have easier access to car parks on the hospital campus, Metro North has arranged for the showgrounds car park to re-open for staff. Staff can access a new daily rate of $4 (using salary packaging) and $4.40 for those using top-up cards (prices include GST). The showgrounds staff car park will be a lot cheaper than the multi-storey car park and a great option for day shift staff – especially those working in the temporary buildings at the northern end of the campus.

Only a limited number of car parking passes are available for the showgrounds, and dozens of staff have already signed up. Make sure you don’t miss out, click here to find out more.

Please take care in this wet weather and drive safely.

Louise.