Rola Tawbe

TPCH has recently welcomed Rola Tawbe to the role of Nursing Director of Hospital Wide and Clinical Support Services (HWCSS).

With over two decades of experience in healthcare, Rola has served around half of these in various senior management roles, working across a broad range of settings including metropolitan hospitals, rural and remote and in state health level positions. She has extensive experience in the day-to-day operations of hospital, and patient access and flow.

In her new role, one of Rola’s main goals is to improve patient flow throughout the hospital, an area which she feels passionately about and has achieved success in previous roles.

In 2018, Rola and her colleagues at Blacktown Mount Druitt hospitals received the NSW Premier’s Award for the Improving Service Levels in Hospitals category. This prestigious award recognised teams that developed initiatives or improvements that led to patients receiving more timely and efficient care within the health system. The initiative, Project Red, reduced the average time patients spent in the hospital emergency department by 80 minutes by involving key hospital departments from emergency to cleaning, working together to improve emergency treatment performance and patient flow.

“TPCH is a busy hospital and is faced daily with the challenges of delivering timely care to patients due to  the level of community demand on our services,” Rola said.

“My role is to identify and manage barriers to patient flow, and help create additional capacity through identifying key elements that contribute to good patient flow.

“Quality, standardised practice, care coordination, demand and capacity planning, demand escalation and governance are crucial in enabling a system-wide approach and resolving delays within the current system.

“This involves work around patient satisfaction, transfer of care, waitlist management and other clinical safety indicators as well as the promotion of best practice standards such as patient flow guidelines and processes.”

Rola sees collaboration and coordination between hospital services as a key factor in achieving access to more timely care for patients.

“It’s about understanding how each area can contribute to streamlining an individual patient’s care journey,” she said.

Rola says that having an agreed set of business rules and processes will support the hospital to become more proactive and agile in how it manages patient flow.

“I am keen to work with areas to develop more innovative ways to do every day business. There are many opportunities to improve patient flow and access in the hospital,” she said.

“It’s about helping areas take a helicopter view of the hospital, and identify where we can work together to make changes and improve the journey for our patients.”