Angie Dobbrick, Executive Director, Caboolture, Kilcoy & Woodford Clinical Directorate
I truly value all your hard work. Weeks like this are a good reminder of the strength of the CKW team. You have all shown this in the cross-collaborations and rapid responses in so many directions.
In addition, the Metro North Board met this week and acknowledged your hard work and expressed their gratitude for your commitment.
Metro North remains in Tier 3 of our COVID-19 and Influenza Response Plan. This means all non-urgent planned care is suspended and PPE in clinical areas has been increased to a minimum of P2/N95 mask and protective eyewear.
I know this change has taken a great deal of work at short notice to implement, but vital to ensure a strong focus on frontline patient care during the current surge of COVID-19 and flu cases in the community.
To support you and safe patient care, we have added further rounding with a Clinical Nurse (Outreach) and after-hours Clinical Nurse Consultant – both working to support patients of concern, finding suitable patients who could receive care from our Virtual ED and supporting staff after-hours.
We have also re-introduced a Nurse Navigator to concentrate on working with teams in the Emergency Department and the wards to identify and safely admit patients into Hospital in the Home (HITH).
Patient safety remains all of our focus and these surges in activity should not take our eye off of safe and quality care. I thank teams for focusing on safe and timely movement of patients to the inpatient wards.
The level of compassionate, patient centred, problem solving that I have witnessed over the past few weeks, especially, is a credit to you all. I have especially seen this in the twice daily bed meetings. As we all know patient flow is all of our responsibility and you are doing a great job pulling together as a team across the hospital.
We’re doing all that we can. Thank you for your continued commitment to safe patient care and achieving the best clinical outcomes for our community.
Embedding a strong research culture
CKW continues to grow a strong research culture. I was proud to see two CKW finalists in the Metro North Health Research Excellence Awards and our charity partner The Common Good recently provided $100,000 towards seven research projects at Caboolture Hospital.
Congratulations to Annabelle Marozza, Dr Shahida Rehman, Deb Sutherland, Aletta Cowen, Dr Mahesh Ramanan, Dr Sean Clark and Dr Thuy Frakking who received grants for a range of projects that will improve the health of our community. The event received some great media coverage as well.
The next research event will be the CKW Research Symposium on Thursday 13 October. For more details, contact the CKW Research Development Unit. Email rdu.caboolture@health.qld.gov.au
Speaking of research, Metro North Clinician Research Fellowships provide health professionals with the opportunity to pursue research without having to fully relinquish their clinical career in favour of a full-time research fellowship.
The Metro North Office of Research will award up to five Fellowships (equivalent to 0.4 FTE clinical backfill for three years and 0.2 FTE for one year) annually to support clinician researchers.
Applications are now open for fellowships starting in 2023.
What a compliment!
Here’s a great compliment from a surgery patient who appreciated compassion from our operational support team:
“Everyone was very caring and showed me respect but what was really nice was a (I think he was an orderly) just came over to me and was chatting and putting me at ease.
“He wasn’t part of the nursing staff, but he was genuinely wanting to put me at ease – a very nice person.”
Finally,
The Moreton Bay Regional Prostate Cancer Support Group and Redcliffe Hospital Urology Department have joined forces again this year for the third annual fun run next Sunday (7 August).
The 10km route will run from Woody Point to Redcliffe Jetty and return. It’s your choice to compete in a five-kilometre walk, five kilometre run or 10-kilometre run. Marshalling and distribution of race-day shirts will start at 6.30am. The 10-kilometre run will start at 7am, the five kilometre will start at 7.10am and the five-kilometre walk will start at 7.15am.
The event helps raise funds for the Redcliffe Hospital Urology Department, Moreton Bay Regional Prostate Cancer Support Group and prostate cancer research.
Take Care,
Angie.