CE Newsletter - Interim Chief Executive Simon Everitt - 19 November 2019 19 Nov 2019
Staff Recognition Awards
19 November 2019
Staff Recognition Awards
Cutting the Staff Recognition Awards cake with Board Chair Sally Webb and Medical Director Dr Hugh Lees, at the Tauranga event.
Staff and whanau enjoying the Whakatane event.
A highlight of my first week as Interim CE has been the Staff Recognition Awards ceremonies in Tauranga and Whakatāne.
As healthcare professionals our focus is always on our patients and their whānau and that is of course as it should be, and is consistent with our CARE values. But what I love about the Staff Recognition Awards is that focus is turned around, albeit briefly, on our wonderful devoted staff, all of you, who give so selflessly of the most precious commodity there is, your time.
The awards recognise staff with over ten years service. The longest serving staff member recognised this year had served 61 years in Whakatāne, with our longest serving Tauranga staff member recognised for 47 years.
Across the Bay of Plenty, longstanding team members have provided 5,954 years of service to our community! What an amazing contribution.
Those being recognised in Tauranga came from 96 different roles and were part of over 129 departments which speaks to the wide range of diversity that we have across the Bay of Plenty health system.
Patient Safety Week 2019
I wanted to talk briefly about this year’s Patient Safety Week which had the thought-provoking theme of ‘unconscious bias’ and its impact on delivery of healthcare services.
There were a variety of promotional activities held throughout the week and it was great to see everyone so engaged. One of these events was the Grand Round hosted by unconscious bias expert Anton Blank. There was a great turnout and a lot of good discussion about unconscious bias and ways that we can all respond to our own bias.
Amongst other things, Anton presented some great tools for health professionals to utilise every day in their practice; ways in which to explore whether they have biases and ways to work with patients to help manage that if they do.
The Health Quality and Safety Commission (HQSC) has produced short videos covering three separate modules on unconscious bias. These are:
• Understanding and addressing bias in health care.
• Te Tiriti o Waitangi, colonisation and racism.
• Experiences of bias.
I would encourage everyone to take a look at these modules and think about and what they can take from them to inform their own practice. The link to these videos is given here: https://www.hqsc.govt.nz/our-programmes/patient-safetyweek/publications-and-resources/publication/3866/
The week’s unconscious bias theme has strong links to our Creating our Culture work and also the focus we have as an organisation on improving Māori health outcomes.
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