CE Newsletter - Interim Chief Executive Simon Everitt - 10 December 2019 10 Dec 2019

Clinician Appreciation Awards 2019

10 December 2019

Clinician Appreciation Awards 2019

Award winners (from left to right): Dr Grant Cavitt - Chadwick Healthcare; Dr Sarah Oberer - Dee Street; Dr Brooke Vosper - Te Puke Medical Centre; Dr Kerry Thomas - Fifth Avenue Family Practice. Absent was Dr Melanie Johns - BOPSASS (BOP Sexual Assault Support Services).

The clinician band Jordan Street entertain the audience.

I recently spent a great evening at the Clinician Appreciation Awards in Tauranga, organised by our BOPDHB GP Liaison Team. This followed a similarly successful event in the Eastern Bay a week earlier.

For me the evening represented a great opportunity to celebrate and recognise the achievements of our doctors working together across the Bay of Plenty health system. There was a great mix of over 50 doctors, both primary and secondary care, in attendance. This was an excellent forum to demonstrate how we can work alongside one another as a health system and to showcase some of the innovative solutions delivered by our medical colleagues.

Clinicians, GPs and senior doctors were asked to nominate their colleagues against five key recognition categories and for the purposes of the awards the DHB’s CARE values were used, which was fantastic. The five categories were: Compassion - Patient Centred Care; All-One-Team - Responsive; Responsive – Amiability Star; Excellence – Top of the Class; Excellence – Quality Improvement/Innovator. Over 200 nominations were recieved in these categories which was a wonderful recognition of their efforts of many of our Clinicians.

One award recipient was Dr Melanie Johns, who picked up the Excellence – Quality Improvement/Innovator. One of Melanie’s nominators said: “She has worked hard to raise awareness of the importance of support for clinicians and to make this available to doctors working in the Bay of Plenty. She has spoken on compassion to doctors at DHB meetings and her talk was awesome. She’s helping make our work more sustainable and enjoyable and combat burnout.”

Another winner on the night was Dr Brooke Vosper, who took out the Excellence – Top of the Class category. A nominator said of Brooke: “The GP had a patient with facial asymmetry and twitching. She researched the condition and came up with Parry-Romberg syndrome. The specialist confessed up to that point he had not heard of it, and when he saw the patient and researched the condition he concluded that she was correct. She was very thorough and made a referral to Plastics who have since done surgery to improve the facial appearance.”

As well as this well-deserved recognition there was a lighter side to the evening in the form of some fantastic entertainment from the band Jordan Street (made up entirely of local clinicians) - which played at the intermission.

This type of event reflects the great work that we are doing together, working collectively as a health system. Thanks to everyone for all their hard work and commitment in looking after our communities.

Opotiki Community Health Centre - from BOPDHB Chief Operating Officer Pete Chandler

Many of you will have seen recent media coverage on the issues we are currently experiencing at Ōpōtiki Community Health Centre. For clarity, I wanted to set out the situation as it stands below.

We have two issues that have developed over recent weeks:

• An issue with primary maternity capacity (LMC’s) and backup midwifery which means it is very difficult to provide safe primary birthing at Ōpōtiki.

• Shortages in the OPINS (Ōpōtiki Independent Nursing Service) which provides 24/7 care at Ōpōtiki Community Health Centre.

Whilst we don’t provide community LMCs, and the OPINS nursing is a contracted, external service, the challenge of workforce shortages is ours to address.

There are two key changes to be aware of as a result of the above:

• For the next 4 months, primary birthing at Ōpōtiki will need to be provided by the Maternity Service at Whakatāne hospital. Whilst the numbers are not large (about one birth a week on average) we recognise that the impact on whānau living along the coast is significant and will want to add any support that we can to birthing mums that are affected by this.

• Ōpōtiki Community Health Centre ceased providing overnight care (from 10pm) with effect from Sunday 1st December.

We had a recent planned hui with key agencies in Ōpōtiki to ensure we were working together to keep people safe. Information about this meeting was shared with the media and a sizeable number of people from Ōpōtiki turned up at the meeting. We took the decision to open the meeting to the public and include them in the briefing and discussion. This was a good thing to do, but did mean that we didn’t have the opportunity to have the full discussion with the other agencies around planning that we had intended.

We’ll be managing this combination of issues in real time over the next few weeks and are seeking to support the local community in this as much as we can, as well as trying to mitigate anyrisks.

We acknowledge that this unplanned situation may place additional pressure on some of you at a time when we are extremely stretched in many areas. Thank you for your ongoing support.

Please click here to read more about Board changes/handover, Ministry officials visit, and Choosing Wisely.