Helen Boocock, Executive Director, STARS

I would like to firstly thank Dale Dally-Watkins for taking on the Acting Executive Director role while I had some time off in January. I hope everyone who managed to take leave over the Christmas break enjoyed the time with their family and friends.

HHS Board Chairs’ Forum meeting
This week STARS hosted the Hospital and Health Services Board Chairs’ Forum meeting – a great opportunity to showcase the facility to other HHS. Meeting attendees were invited on a tour of the building, and all were impressed with the levels of care being provided at STARS as well as the wonderful facilities for both patients and staff.

New staff
With the start of the new year, I would like to welcome all the new junior doctors and registrars to STARS. Our wonderful team culture is one of our strengths at STARS so please make all our new staff feel very welcome.

For our new staff, if you didn’t already know, STARS has a Staff Council who provide strategic leadership and advocacy on behalf of staff to deliver excellent patient care at STARS. Essentially, the Staff Council is a key forum for every member of staff at STARS to have input into our hospital. If you would like more information about the Staff Council see their messages here or contact them at STARS_Staff_Council@health.qld.gov.au.

Two years of care at STARS
This month marks two years since STARS first opened its doors to patients. In this short time STARS has become a national and state-wide multiple award-winning service whilst providing exceptional quality care, all with an excellent staff culture. STARS has played a significant role in reducing long wait times for a range of patients across Metro North. There have been so many achievements in our relatively short history. Here are a just a few highlights:

• Achieved full 12-month ACHS accreditation in March 2022 with no formal recommendations for change.
• Scored a 70% staff engagement score in the May 2021 BPA staff engagement survey (the best score of any clinical facility in Metro North Health).
• STARS Ambulatory Services seeing, on average, 418 specialist outpatient occasions of service per day.
• STARS Surgical and Procedural services performing 11,000 surgical procedures per year.
• STARS Gastroenterology seeing 9,500 gastroenterology patients per year.
• Co-design of specialist rehabilitation STARS BIRU service which significantly improved the flow of brain injury patients to rehabilitation.
• STARS Pharmacy dispensed approximately 35,000 items as well as 10,000 Tier 2/ambulatory occasion of services to peri-operative care and medication safety and 23,000 clinical pharmacy reviews.
• STARS Research and Education Alliance includes 64 studies on the research profile, over 54 grant applications submitted in 2022 and over 40 peer reviewed papers.
• Introduction of Amazon Connect to administration services resulted in up to 2,780 additional call per service between June and November 2022.
• Over 100 allied health clinical placements provided within STARS per academic year.
• STARS Patient Support Services have provided 36,164 patient transport and cleaning tasks within the last 12 months and 9,157 calls for security services support.
• STARS Health Information Services collaboration in anaesthetics for documentation and reporting yields an additional $1.32M (January to June 2022) and $1.31M (July to December 2022).

I look forward to holding a staff event mid-year to further celebrate our wonderful achievements. We’ll be in touch with more details around that soon.

Best wishes and thank you as always for all your care of our patients, community and each other.

Helen