Debbie McNamara
Welcome to the first STARS Gazer newsletter. I am very proud to share with you some of the wonderful highlights and outcomes of the past few months in what has been an incredible and busy first half of 2021.
Our Surgical, Treatment and Rehabilitation Service (STARS) is well and truly operational as Queensland’s first new digital hospital and clinical activity is well underway.
I have immense pride in how we have been able to pivot and change with new models of care and new services, to ensure we deliver on STARS’ purpose – providing safe, quality and tailored healthcare to patients.
We have been busy, to say the least, over the last few months as we achieved many firsts. There are too many to mention them all, but here are some of our highlights.
In February, we successfully kicked off stage 1 of our ramp-up of clinical activity and welcomed our first patients. We held our first face-to-face clinics using ieMR and rolled out the digital Go Live the following week.
We welcomed STARS’s first surgical and procedural patients and procedures and conducted 48 procedures and 64 surgeries in week one of these services commencing.
We passed Interim Accreditation with flying colours within two weeks of commencing clinical activity. STARS was assessed against all applicable actions in the eight National Safety and Quality Health Service (NSQHS) Standards with all actions MET and no recommendations from the assessors.
We hosted Metro North’s Indigenous community and held a water blessing ceremony before services commenced at STARS.
We safely moved more than 50 patients from GARU and GEM to their new wards at STARS. We have onboarded over 700 people who are now working at STARS.
In March we celebrated with consumer representatives who helped us define our consumer strategy and look ahead to realising our patient-centric approach to providing safe and quality healthcare.
We have a deadly Indigenous team in place to work towards Closing the Gap by helping Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people receive quality healthcare and achieve better health outcomes, and at the same time support their Indigenous colleagues within STARS.
And, in March, the COVID-19 vaccine hub commenced at STARS. An exciting step for STARS to be able to deliver this important service.
In April we operationalised Ward 4B and opened 30 new beds ahead of our ramp up schedule. This is STARS’ contribution to the network and has created capacity for COVID and non-COVID patients across the health service.
In May we almost doubled the state-wide response rate for PREMs uptake by reaching a response rate of 27 per cent! While it is still early days for collecting PREMs, our patients have provided us with valuable insights and will inform ongoing improvements at STARS.
We have successfully shifted our focus to the everyday care of our patients by providing healthcare services to our community.
Plato wisely said, ‘the beginning is the most important part of the work’. As we celebrate our firsts, for us, this is just the beginning.
Best,
Debbie