Eastern Health recognised for significant and sustained improvement

Eastern Health received an award for significant and sustained improvement as part of a Timely Emergency Care Collaborative (TECC) award ceremony.

The TECC is run by the Victorian Department of Health and is made up of 14 health services. Eastern Health has been recognised for demonstrating improved emergency department flow as a result of patient flow improvement work across Eastern Health Box Hill.

This included successful change ideas around optimising Short Stay unit, the ‘Home for Brunch’ initiative on the General Medicine wards and more recent success in optimising the use of Fast Track and  Transit Lounge.

Director of Emergency Services, Dr Peter Jordan and Emergency Physician Dr Anita Liu were amongst those to accept the award at the ceremony yesterday.

“I’ve completed many projects over the past 10 years, and when I look back the ones that have worked best, it’s been the ones when we’ve meaningfully brought people off the floor and involved frontline clinicians.

“Certainly for me and the organisation, seeing clinician leaders, like Anita, emerge and become improvement experts and leaders in the broader sense is the greatest thing,” Dr Jordan said.

Dr Liu followed, touching on how empowering the workforce to learn and improve every day has broken down barriers to create episodes of excellent care. 

“From a barriers point of view, it is easy as a clinician on the frontline to feel you’re working in silos. What this initiative proved to us, is that if we’re working together towards a common goal for improving patient care we can break down the silos.

“When we aligned our goals across our short stay and inpatient teams, we improved the processes all the way down to offloading the ambulances in ED,” Dr Liu added.