SOUTH Gippsland Hospital is a great resource for the local community and the many thousands of visitors to the Corner Inlet region. In any year it assists more than 1500 In-patients and Community Health clients for a wide range of diverse health care needs such as maternity, day procedures, urgent care, physiotherapy, district nursing, dietetics and diabetes education.
The Hospital Board, management, staff and medical practitioners have recently been discussing their plans for the future. They would like to share their findings with the community and seek community feedback.
Hospital CEO Peter Rushen explained, “Like most organisations that strive to be the best, we have a vision, mission and set of values we aspire to work to, along with key focus areas to meet identified health needs in our region. To meet these needs we’ve started to develop the kind of responses that will help us to achieve this in the immediate, medium and long term.”
Mr Rushen outlined these responses across six areas:
“To be a health service that is responsive to community needs and engages our community in the planning of services and how they are delivered. [This involves] plans for the further development of the hospital, with significant building works to provide new maternity service facilities and a new operating theatre recovery suite. It might also include forming partnerships with other organisations, more care planning in consultation with patients and physicians, services delivered in the home to prevent unnecessary admissions, early intervention, and new or different models of care such as palliative (end of life) care.
“To improve our community’s health status (how healthy we are). Ensure that everyone in the community has the opportunity to gain information about or participate in, programs to help them manage their own health through health promotion activities and partnerships and early intervention programs and outreach services across the health precinct (hospital, aged care and general practice) and regionally, while raising awareness about the range of services the hospital can provide.
“Expand our service, workforce and capacity. To attract and keep a highly skilled workforce so that we can introduce more community and home-based care, helping our community to understand their own health care and offering the health service as a training facility for all health professionals.
“To increase the financial sustainability of our health service and become more productive. With a strong financial footing through traditional grant funding and community support, we believe we can work with other local health services to expand primary and acute care services, identify gaps and minimise duplications.
“Seek improvement and innovation. We recognise that we need to meet and stay ahead of the quality of care systems for hospitals and work with the Foster Medical Centre and Prom Country Aged Care as a recently formed health precinct. We also need to consider new technology such as e-health, telehealth and remote monitoring technology to enable our systems and processes to be improved.
“And finally, we want to increase accountability and transparency through more open reporting by providing our community and all stakeholders with information on how we are doing with service outcomes and performance and how you can access this through the hospital’s website, the Department of Health web communication called Myhospital, the Quality of Care Report, which is printed in The Mirror, and other media and various hospital publications.”
“This is your hospital, serving you and your family from the youngest to the oldest member. If you would like to add your voice to how it may look in the future please contact us via email at [email protected] or by calling 5683 9777,” Mr Rushen concluded.
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