Chief Finance and Corporate Officer: Alister Whitta

I’m happy to report that Metro North concluded Financial Year 2021-22 with a small surplus. This positive result occurred due to the hard work and dedication of staff both clinical and non-clinical working through another year of challenges relating to our operating environment which was impacted by significant changes in activity levels from the tiered response to the pandemic, cost escalations and revenue disruption.

Metro North has now signed the 2022-23 Service Level Agreement with the Department and directorates have received their budget allocations and are working through strategies to ensure continuation of our high quality care and maximise the use of these public funds.

S4/HANA

This week we had an extended outage of S4/HANA which impacted our ability to undertake many essential business processes. It’s good to see our Business Continuity Plans worked effectively and that the system is back online and returned to business as usual.

Mileage claims

I’d like to acknowledge those staff that move across our health service and perform their duties at a number of our sites. I wish to remind you, should you use your own vehicle, please ensure that you are processing your motor vehicle mileage claims appropriately through myHR and seeking approval of these with an Executive Director who holds the appropriate financial delegation.

Please also remember that unless explicitly stated in your employment agreement, home to work trips are deemed private travel and should not be claimed.

For further information please refer to the Metro North Staff Travel Procedure.

Managing records

Finally, as Metro North’s Privacy Champion, I acknowledge that Metro North manages a significant number of records. Did you know that records should only be destroyed in accordance with our records destruction schedule?

Before records are destroyed you must:

• clarify with Records Management the process to ensure authorisation to dispose of records is in compliance with the Metro North Policy.
• check that records are no longer needed for ongoing business (talk to the relevant business area)
• check that the records are not required for any Right to Information (RTI) requests
• ensure records are not required as evidence for any current or pending legal action or RTI request (the destruction of evidence is an offence under the Criminal Code Act 1899)
• check that no disposal freezes have been issued for the records
• consider any other potential reason to retain records–you may need to do a risk assessment if they relate to a high-profile issue (e.g. asbestos).
• seek endorsement from Metro North’s Chief Executive or authorised delegate.

More information on record disposal.

Alister