Professor Ken Butcher: The New South Wales statewide telestroke service represents a partnership between multiple Health agencies including Prince of Wales Hospital, The Agency for Clinical Innovation, eHealth, and most importantly are 23 regional site partners to deliver acute state-of-the-art stroke care to patients in regional New South Wales.
Since the program has been implemented we've delivered acute care to nearly 3,000 patients at our regional sites.
This ensured has these patients saw a subspecialist stroke neurologist within minutes of hitting the emergency department door, and best practice decisions were made, and treatment plans enacted that were as good or better than what you would see at any of our metropolitan specialist centres.
Winning a New South Wales Health award would mean recognition for the hard work of literally thousands of healthcare workers that are looking after our stroke patients on the front lines every day.
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Jemma Milloy: The Aboriginal GOT IT! program had a really amazing response for our local community. What really shone through was the localised approach we had to Aboriginal community and culture and the traditional healing that was infused.
Parents said that they felt understood and that there was a validation that Aboriginal culture was important to the way that we understand emotions for children. Primary School teachers started to get a deeper understanding of the context of children's emotions and better ways to respond to those emotions in the classroom setting.
Winning a New South Wales Health Award would mean that there's broader validation of the work that not just myself, but the whole team and the efforts of that community have put in to making this project happen.
Our community has been really vulnerable in sharing not just the information and stories about their families, but the ways of teaching into the future around emotion recognition and healing practices, continuing on not just for our community, but across the state.
Cecilia Bjorksten: Our project provided access to specialised mental health clinical pharmacy services via Telehealth at Tamworth, Taree and Maitland. Medications are particularly important for mental health consumers as they tend to have a high incidence of side effects and drug interactions with non-psychiatric medications.
Rosa Baleato: We are able to provide clinical support to the treating teams at these remote sites with respect to prescribing guidance, administration guidance ,and also patient counselling..
Winning a New South Wales Health Award would be a really proud moment for us. It would be acknowledgment of the hard work and also of the value of the virtual pharmacy service, and it's important in shared decision making with both clinicians and patients to achieve excellent patient outcomes.
Dr Rachel Sutherland: SWAP-IT is a scalable and innovative digital lunch box program that's delivered direct to a parent's mobile phone, and it supports them to swap out discretionary foods and swap in healthy lunch box alternatives for their children.
Over a series of randomized control trials, our team has demonstrated that SWAP-IT can impact on the lunchbox foods both packed and consumed during the school day. It also has benefits beyond the school day demonstrating that it can impact on a child's whole day dietary intake, and it improves their nutritional status.
Winning a New South Wales health and award would mean an enormous amount to our team, our partners, and the community. It demonstrates that New South Wales Health is committed to preventative health research when so much amazing research occurs across our health system.
Patricia Correll: Lumos is a data asset. It brings together data from general practices with a whole lot of data from the New South Wales health system so that we have the patient journey across the primary and acute care sectors and that helps the system make good decisions about patient care.
Samantha Moubarak: It provides an evidence base that allows us to follow the patient journey and generate actionable insights that help us make a difference in the care that's delivered to patients.
We can use this information to inform decision making across the New South Wales whole system and deliver on our strategic priorities.
Patricia Correll: Winning a New South Wales Health award would be a great honour to me and to the team that have worked so hard on bringing together this quite unique data source and asset for informing our health services.
Dr Nicole Nathan: Physically Active Children in Education or PACE program is an effective cost-effective and scalable model of support for increasing New South Wales schools implementation of a management physical activity policy.
PACE has been delivered in six Local Health Districts, meaning that more than 100,000 children have benefited from the program. So the scale-up of PACE across the rest of New South Wales would mean that more children will benefit from daily physical activity at school which would significantly increase the short and long-term health benefits.
Winning a New South Wales Health Award would mean not only a lot to us in the health district, but I think also to our education partners. During the time of PACE our schools have been through so much. They've had bushfires, floods, COVID, school closures, and despite all those challenges they've remained committed to supporting the implementation of this physical activity policy.
Rory Allthorpe: So when COVID really kicked off back in December 2021 with the surge in cases due to the Omicron variant the State ODS Program Team were called upon to build a solution for patients to be able to register their RAT tests, so not just their PCR tests.
Linda Toogood: It also meant that we could get SMS's out to the patients pretty much straight away within a couple of hours of them registering their test.
Rory Allthorpe: A really proud moment for the whole team, and a wonderful acknowledgment of the hard work and dedication and the contribution to helping to keep the New South Wales Community safe.
Linda Toogood: We all know that we had a huge impact on the community, but winning an award just means that the rest of New South Wales knows that as well.
Dr Jean-Frédéric Levesque: The Telestroke Service is a novel program where we harness digital technologies to make acute care for stroke available in rural and remote settings.
The role of the Agency for Clinical Innovation in the Telestroke service was to first design a model of care, really providing guidance to local clinicians about the program. Second, we had the role to coordinate different stakeholders because this was really a state-wide approach transforming care for rural and remote settings. And finally, we supported the implementation across all of the districts in New South Wales.
Winning a New South Wales Health Award for the Telestroke program would really mean that the work that all the partners have put into this implementation is recognised and really give everybody a sense of accomplishment that despite all the hurdles, despite the challenges in rolling program across the state, in many different settings working with various partners such as eHealth, South Eastern Sydney Local Health District, the Ministry of Health, and of course all the local clinicians was really worthwhile.
Alison Taylor: So with the Words Matter project we aim to improve staff awareness and knowledge of the words that we use and the impact that they have. Because we know that our words express our attitudes towards the care that we give, and this is in line with trauma-informed patient-centred, and recovery-orientated care.
The Words Matter project has a beneficial impact on our patients, especially those from our Aboriginal and gender diverse community, but also on our peer workers and on the staff who work with us who have lived experience of mental health illness.
Winning the New South Wales Health award would be fantastic. To be recognized at a state level for the work that we do every day and to be able to showcase mental health in a positive light would be really affirming.
Staff at Coffs Harbor inpatient unit are compassionate kind and extremely knowledgeable.
Sandy Coombs: The Last Days of Life: Neonatal and Paediatric Toolkit provides best practice guidance to clinicians around recognising dying, creating a medical management plan ensuring that there's communication tools available such as information sheets to parents.
It also provides best practice regarding medication so that the child has maintained comfort and acknowledges early recognition of symptoms and making sure their management is tended to quickly.
Winning a New South Wales Health Award would mean greater awareness of the toolkit, but also acknowledgment for all the people that have been involved in this project. It has been a massive undertaking. It's been a collaboration between different Health Services. It has included lots of different disciplines, and it's all so involved our families.
Julie Smith: My role is manager of Aboriginal employment for Hunter New England Local Health District, and one of my primary focuses has been to assist the LHD in moving forward to build a very large Aboriginal workforce, and we have been successful in that, although we still have many lessons to learn, and we now employee over 970 Aboriginal people within our hospital and health facilities.
Winning the New South Wales Health award is a great personal achievement. It's been hard work, sweat and sometimes tears, and I really appreciate that New South Wales Health has, has recognised that work and Hunter New England Local Health District has spent a lot of time and effort in ensuring that we've been able to employ a large number of Aboriginal staff and I'm really pleased to be able to receive this award.
Garth Hungerford: I volunteer on many committees with the MLHD, PHN, and at a state level, but near and dear to my heart is the Wagga Wagga Local Health Advisory Committee, and our project this year was focusing on youth mental health by developing multicoloured silicon wristbands with the words "Head Here for Help" and a QR code which directs local students to a dedicated website to access information on their own time or with their peers.
Winning a New South Wales Health Award would put a spotlight on partnering with consumers, patient-centred care and a development of new models of care to descend.
Everything I do as a consumer advocate is to affect change and improve the health outcomes of our consumers.