Dr Simon Bugden, Acting Executive Director, Caboolture, Kilcoy & Woodford Clinical Directorate

Caring for people and helping them get better … it’s what we do.

Doing this at the moment is very challenging for many teams. We have spent most of the past week on Tier 3 (old Code Yellow) due to high community demand.

In order to help our teams, so we can care for people and help them get better, we need to make some temporary adjustments for the next three days (Wednesday 15 June to Friday 17 June inclusive). Collectively, we need:

• To postpone all non-essential meetings, if it will enable staff to help frontline patient care and flow.
  • This means that for most teams, the only meetings which will occur are those relating to quality and safety, essential life saving skills training, finance, fire and general evacuation mandatories.
• All staff with clinical skills to be either providing clinical care or available for redeployment.
  • This means non-clinical work and clinical support time will not occur, unless approved by the Service Line or Professional Leads for a set purpose and time.
• The situation we are in is being experienced nationwide. We are at the pointy end of the experience, as we await an increase in space and staffing to match the needs of our growing community. We welcome any ideas you have so please chat to your manager if you have suggestions.
• We are recruiting for a lot of additional staff. We are particularly looking for nurses, RMOs, nurse practitioners, registrars … if you know someone who is good, please let them know about our recruitment and ask them to contact us soon.

Stand strong, reflect on the value you provide for our community.

In the midst of the busy times, please care for people and help them get better.

Simon.