Staff profile - Meet Jenny Green

Health Infrastructure’s Service and Facility Planning team have been supporting health facilities to find more capacity in order to prepare for an influx of patients with COVID-19. Read more about this important work.

In non-pandemic times, what is your role in NSW Health? What does that involve?

I work for Health Infrastructure (HI) as the Team Lead for the Service and Facility Planning team.

Our team is assigned to a range of projects and provides support to the project team by ensuring the clinical services plan informs facility requirements (e.g. number of beds and operating theatres) and developing functional, operational and spatial requirements for each service (e.g. an intensive care unit). This input continues through the project life-cycle to assist with the layout of each department and each room.

We are also called on by the project teams to provide advice on how a clinical requirement can be supported through a change in practise, technology, a facility solution or a combination of all three. This work involves significant benchmarking with similar services across NSW and Australia and liaison with other pillars such as Agency for Clinical Innovation (ACI), Clinical Excellence Commission (CEC) and NSW Health Pathology.

What are you doing as part of the COVID-19 response?

I assist HI’s COVID-19 team with service and facility planning issues and have worked with the team to develop guidelines to assist health facilities to adapt in order to care for COVID-19 patients (Adapting Existing Clinical Spaces for Surge Capacity).

The guidelines were required to support health services find more capacity within their existing facilities to prepare for an influx of patients.

My role also involves working with other parts of NSW Health, particularly with the ACI and the CEC, and our projects teams, to ​resolve facility-related problems relating to the management of patients with COVID-19, as they arise.

Have you been involved in anything like this before?

Never. It’s quite unique, however, I believe HI is very well placed in terms of addressing issues because we have experience managing projects and solving problems, and those skills have allowed our teams to provide support to the broader system in a very capable way.

What’s your biggest learning to date?

NSW Health has invested in a huge amount of capital works over the last decade and this investment has certainly made a system response to COVID-19 much easier. 

Those simple changes have allowed NSW Health to increase the number of patients who can be managed in a single room to limit the transmission of certain organisms and clinical conditions. So, I suppose the learning from this is that the continuous improvement that we have built into our project work has put us in a very good place to be responding to the COVID-19 outbreak from, and I am feeling very proud to be part of that outcome.

You have good insights into what’s happening with the pandemic. What do you tell family and friends when they ask?

I tell them that we are in incredibly good hands and to believe what they hear and to do as they’re told because it is simple advice and it is easy to implement.

The leadership shown by the NSW Premier, the Health Minister and senior clinical staff across the health system has been very impressive. It just shows you the immense capability of the people who work in NSW Health.

What’s your message to colleagues across the system?

I would like to continue to work with our colleagues across system to understand lessons learned that can be incorporated into our future health redevelopments, and we are always keen to apply our diverse skillset to help solve problems arising. 

I appreciate this will be a pretty intense time right now at work – how do you unwind if you get a spare moment?

I’ve been walking a lot with my partner and my dog. It can be very easy to get caught spending all day at your desk, so I’ve enjoyed making the time to get out of the house, get some fresh air and keep up the exercise.​​​​