Julie Smith: My role is manager of Aboriginal employment for Hunter New England Local Health district, andnd 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.
As a finalist, I feel that it's a great achievement to be nominated for such an award under New South Wales Health, and it's also contributes to, and highlights the great work that Hunter New England Local Health District has done in the space of Aboriginal employment and workforce.
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Olivia Tierney: So, we implemented a variety of midwifery models of care across all our maternity services here in the Mid North Coast Local Health District, really so that regional women were able to access care from a known midwife throughout their pregnancy, and their birth, and also be able to implement those models in a very successful and sustainable way.
So as a finalist, I feel really excited and truly honoured for the recognition to be part of the New South Wales Health Awards. This is truly amazing and I think it really speaks to how collaborative leadership can really bring you such joy in the work that you do, and being able to work on this particular project with all of our healthcare staff, and the women and families in our community here in North Coast was really such a rewarding and enjoyable way to be able to work together to improve our healthcare services here in regional New South Wales.
Kami Dibden: I'm very privileged to have the role of managing the volunteer service for our local health district. Volunteers help in the wards, but also behind the scenes in so many different areas, and I help coordinate and make that happen.
As a finalist, I'd be super humbled. There's so many people that work for New South Wales Health that have shown up each and every day and do amazing things. I don't really feel deserving of being a finalist, but I'm excited to represent what volunteers do and to be an ambassador, and hopefully other organisations can hear about what we do, and do great things with volunteers as well.
Dr Melanie Berry: Last year in August 2021 when Delta COVID hit in Western New South Wales, myself and a number of other clinicians stood up a service to look after patients with COVID in their houses.
We wanted to identify the patients that were going to get sick and get them into hospital when they needed to come as soon as possible and look after patients safely at home, and this was across a really large amount of land, so 270,000 square kilometres. So, a lot of challenges with access to high level intensive cares.
As a finalist I find that to be incredibly humbling I think, but it's not just a one person award. And actually like what we did is a group of collaboration group, so I feel like it would be recognising and receiving award for all of us that were involved in the service. Mostly just really proud of what we did, but it's always nice to be knowledge for that.
Jemma Milloy: The Aboriginal GOT IT! program had a really amazing response for our local community. This was both the parents and the families that participated in the program, and also the staff that work collaboratively with us. 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. Parents felt a strength within their parenting practices and children were able to get a deeper understanding of how to communicate their emotions to not just their families but also their Educators and their health staff that surrounded them.
The Aboriginal GOT IT! program has been a really innovative approach in infusing culture and Healthcare.
As a finalist, we feel really excited that there's been recognition from a state-wide level of the outcomes of the program. And we really see that there can be impacts further across the state in the way that we think about culture and healthcare practice.
Sharon Brown: During the COVID-19 pandemic at the start we created a Aboriginal support team for our mob and to support our communities. During that time we were able to run successful vaccination clinics, a dedicated phone service and a web page
We're part of a larger team with the Aboriginal Health Unit the Public Health Unit and Community organisations and we all work together to support our mob.
Tara Green: Some of the impacts were we vaccinated a large percentage of SESLHD community members. We offered support and information to our community and we were just a friendly face for people to call when they needed support.
We were able to connect community members with social work. We were providing rapid antigen test when they weren't available. We were providing some grocery support, cultural support, giving out correct information, and just being a friendly line that people could get through to us
Sharon Brown: By creating culturally appropriate ways of working with our community and our mob, we were able to ensure that their health needs were met during the pandemic.
As a finalist we feel very proud of our team. We are representing a large group of people that all work together, and it's been great to be recognised for all our hard work over the past two years during the pandemic, and we look forward to working more together and keeping our mob safe.
Belinda Cashman: The program was about converting the Aboriginal Health Hub into a culturally safe space for the Aboriginal Community during the COVID pandemic.
We were pretty much the only one that was left doors open to the Aboriginal community during the whole of the COVID pandemic for two years. We started looking at how we could assist the community on the run or provide knowledge or education to them on COVID, provided a culturally safe space for the Aboriginal Community to come to, to get health needs or any kind of requirements during COVID-19.
As a finalist, I'm feeling very excited very proud, not only for myself but for the team because they worked very hard during that time. I believe that like many people they went above and beyond the call of commitment to providing those services to the community.
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. This project shows that embedding mental health pharmacists within clinical teams at mental health sites can improve patient outcomes in terms of medication choice, prescribing, and side effect monitoring and prevention.
Cecilia Bjorksten: As a finalist we feel this is a fantastic opportunity to showcase the value of embedding mental health clinical pharmacists in multidisciplinary teams.
Nancy Jong: Our project is the New South Wales Suicide Monitoring System. It's a collaboration between the Department of Community and Justice, the State Coroner, New South Wales Police as well as New South Wales Health.
Alison Passé-de Silva: Our project is about providing timely and up-to-date information about suspected suicide deaths in New South Wales, so that it can inform reporting and prevention activities across New South Wales health.
Nancy Jong: So just helps local organisations and Local Health Districts involved in suicide prevention activities to identify local trends, and also identify possible risk groups within New South Wales.
Alison Passé-de Silva: It's exciting to be recognized as a finalist because this is a whole of government project. It covers multiple agencies who have all had a role in this project.
Nancy Jong: Our team would be honoured to have our work recognised.
Di Simes: So suicide unfortunately is the leading cause of death of young people, children and young people in Australia, and when there's a suicide death, it has a big impact on the young person's family their friends at school, and many other people that they have come in contact with.
It provides a kind of coordinated and very timely response after a suicide death to try and identify who needs support, and provides the kind of support that they each need
Ayisha Chitakunye: After we've enacted it we know we've had feedback from the framework, and we know that the impact has been to provide support containment and to give a systematic response to the, to the incident.
We also have reviews from the families in the consumers. The framework has actually helped with supporting them in identifying where they can have help if they need it when these things happen. So it's an overall wrap around care after an incident, that just helps the families, the clinicians, and everyone involved.
As a finalist we feel very excited to be in this space and to have this recognition that the hard work that people have put through and the contribution to the framework is actually being recognised. We just give all credit back to the clinicians and we also recognise the families, and the young consumers who contributed to the framework. So we're really excited and really thank everybody for our nominating us.
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 importantly.
It can be delivered at a population level and scaled up for as little as seven cents per student. So, importantly the benefits of healthy eating not only improves child health, but also improves their ability to concentrate and learn at school. So, if we can roll out swap at a population level then we've got the ability to improve child health and prevent the impact of chronic disease.
As a finalist we're so proud of the work that we've done to co-design an innovative program that not only meets the needs of the community and the parents, but also forms part of the solution to preventing chronic disease.
Patricia Correll: Lumos is a data asset. It brings together data from general practices with the 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.
As a finalist with the New South Wales Health award. Our team are absolutely excited and elated to be recognized for the hard work on the last three years to deliver the Lumos program.
Assoc Professor Celi Varol: Profocal-Rx is a new targeted laser therapy system for men who've been diagnosed with prostate cancer. It's an Australian design invention and with manufacturing in Sydney, Australia.
It's a single needle treatment that targets the prostate cancer only without removing the whole prostate gland or affecting the prostate gland itself. It's a day-only procedure. Patients go in the same day, and what's really great about this is that it can be performed over and over again if it needs to be and it has virtually no side effects. And that's quite a novel for someone who's been diagnosed with prostate cancer, and they walk out feeling fantastic.
One in six men will be diagnosed with prostate cancer in Australia and every second patient could potentially be treated with Profocal-Rx. It's current under trial and initial results are fantastic. We think it's going to be a game changer for men who've been diagnosed with prostate cancer, not only in Australia, but globally.
As finalists it would reinforce the fact that all the hard work that we've put into the trial at Nepean Public Hospital over the last three years and also validating the hard work that occurred five years prior to this.
Assoc Professor Vivien Chen: COVID-19 vaccination was a really huge issue for Australia in 2021, and we relied heavily on the AstraZeneca vaccine. And we saw that there was a brand new disease. A complication of the AstraZeneca vaccine that was called vaccine-induced thrombosis and thrombocytopenia.
This was a brand new disease and we needed to pivot the research that we were doing here at the ANZAC Research Institute into a novel diagnostic test that became available to all Australians.
The coming together of the clinical, diagnostic and research teams enabled us to provide a diagnostic and management platform that could give people confidence in the vaccine and reduce down mortality rates from the initial reports 40% to 50% down to 5% mortality here in Australia.
As a finalist we're absolutely thrilled. So many people when above and beyond giving their time and expertise without expectation of thanks and it's wonderful to have this recognition.
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.
Now in terms of impacts, we know that there are lots of short and long-term benefits for children who are physically active, but unfortunately only around a third of children actually meet those physical activity guidelines, which is really worrying because physical activity behaviours developed in childhood track into adulthood. So PACE is supporting children to be more active which will hopefully reduce their risk of developing chronic disease later in life.
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.
As a finalist, we feel extremely proud that our work has been recognised for its excellence. PACE is now an international exemplary best practice. It is the only program globally that has demonstrated the efficacy of a model to support schools implement a mandatory physical activity policy. So we're thrilled to be considered for a New South Wales Health Award.
Dr Jonathon Brett: So the PANDA unit stands for the Psychiatry and non-Prescription Drug and Alcohol Unit. This was constructed as a unique unit, the first in the country in response to what we've received as an unmet need. So what the PANDA Unit was, was a 15 year project that ended in a redesign of the emergency department.
So ultimately what we provided is a really low stimulus environment six-bedded units were all the beds are monitored. But uniquely we provided a model of care with allied health, drug and alcohol, nursing, and specialist medical input to really try and meet the needs of this really vulnerable population
Dr Matthew Bode: And it's really had a huge impact on patients and staff. It's provides a safe space for patients to be seen and indirectly a
safer place for staff to work. It's helped reduce violent episodes within the emergency department, and it provides the space where those patients can be seen effectively by the multidisciplinary team and Allied Health.
Dr Jonathon Brett: As finalists, we feel very grateful for the Ministry of Health funding this project, and to the SIREN group who raise the additional funds to make this happen. I feel very privileged because it's greatly improved my work experience and my quality of work.
Neela Sitaram: The Connected Care Clinic is a multidisciplinary paediatric clinic that aims to meet the health needs and improve health outcomes for vulnerable children and their families.
Primarily for the vulnerable families and children that we work with, they now have a service that aims to understand and meet their needs that connects and breaks down barriers between health services, education, Departments of Communities and Justice and Community Services. We work as a whole rather than in silos.
Sema Mustafa: We would feel incredibly grateful to be a finalist for the New South Wales Health Award. To have our clinic acknowledged at that level would be an absolutely amazing opportunity. We work in an amazing team of social work, paediatricians, nursing staff, as well as our community partners and it would be amazing to have that acknowledgment of the hard work we do, and have the recognition for our project.
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: I think this one made a huge impact because it just meant that people didn't need to go and get a PCR test, that they could do their RAT test at home and record it themselves, and that really alleviated the pressure on the PCR testing sites. And 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.
Being a finalist really means that our work has been recognized as something that's had a huge impact on the community.
Rory Allthorpe: It is a really nice acknowledgment of all that hard work and dedication.
Dr Richard Mitchell: Our project is a co-designed rapid antigen testing clinic for COVID-19 for patients and families of the Kids Cancer Centre. We asked our patients and families the best way to design a clinic to make sure that we had something that provided a safe and effective method of testing in the middle of a pandemic
Dr Felicity Wright: Co-designing a rapid antigen pilot for the Kids Cancer Centre community is a great example of patients and families working together with clinicians to Build a better health service.
We've asked a lot of our families in the last few years, and this time we ask them to help us design a rapid antigen pilot testing clinic to deliver care and testing on the same day. We did this and we did it in four days
Over 150 families helped us design this service and we were able to provide testing and care at the same place, at the same time for patients in the kids cancer centre community
As a finalist, we feel honoured to represent the Kids Cancer Centre community. With the input from children and young people and their families living with cancer, we were able to design a rapid antigen COVID-19 Clinic and we were able to implement it within four days. We were also able to demonstrate that we reduced their concern with coming into hospital. This is no mean feat for a parent living with a child, living with cancer in the middle of pandemic.
David Follent: Our project is Finding your way, a shared decision making for Aboriginal people. So this project takes Aboriginal people across New South Wales through a journey about making shared decision making in their own health care.
It's really about lifting mob up and encouraging them to take an active role in their own healthcare.
Tara Dimopoulos-Bick: Finding your way makes an impact beyond the COVID-19 vaccines. We've heard from 132 users and we know that finding your way is culturally safe and that the visual aspects speak to mob and identify with Indigenous culture.
Melissa Cawley: We see great potential in enhancing the model and expanding it through other aspects of care for Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people.
As a finalist, I feel really proud of ourselves, the project team, but most importantly of the community members and clinicians who engage so well with the model
David Follent: This gives an important recognition to the amazing work that many people have contributed to this project.
Tara Dimopoulos-Bick: We're incredibly proud to share and celebrate Finding your way and recognise the fantastic collaboration with the Agency for Clinical Innovation, and community members from across New South Wales to develop an incredibly meaningful resource.
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. It's really enabling clinicians locally to be supported by specialists making sure that patients receive appropriate and timely care for stroke.
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, and now impacting 3,000 patients lives since the inception of the program
As a finalist, we feel extremely proud to have changed the lives of patients living in rural and remote settings. It's great to see a new way to deliver care rolled out across the state in partnership with various organisations, and really working with local clinicians so that the care that we provide for patients is improved, and that's why we're here for
John Enright: The Akuna Specimen Tracking System gives our teams in our labs the confidence and ability to make sure that the patient specimens they're handling on a day-to-day basis arrive where they need to, when they need to, to ensure we can deliver, you know results for patients when they're needed.
Judy Kempton-Webb: The Akuna Specimen Tracking System has had a huge impact on New South Wales Health Pathology and our diagnostic and forensic laboratories. This electronic specimen tracking system ensures best patient care and supports our staff across our diagnostic and forensic services, and ensures the safe delivery of all specimens for testing.
As a finalist, we are very proud to be part of an esteemed group of staff from New South Wales Health who value the care and safety of our patients.
Oliver Tegg: We developed the CARAT tool which is the Cardiac Arrest Risk Assessment Tool, and we introduced it into the Paediatric Intensive Care Unit at Children's Hospital at Westmead.
And the reason why we developed the tool was because we were seeing an increased rate of cardiac arrest events in the Paediatric Intensive Care Unit, and we know that the mortality for infants and children that have a cardiac arrest event is over 50%. So we wanted to develop a tool that we could use at the bedside with the team to identify risk factors for arrest events occurring and put mitigating strategies around the patients to prevent the rest events from happening.
And since we've actually implemented the CARAT tool we've seen a decrease in arrest events in the PICU over a 12 month period of 75%, and this has actually been able to empower the team that's helping to look after the patients to improve the assessment at the bed space and also improve the outcomes for infants and children in New South Wales.
As a finalist, we feel privileged to be able to represent the Sydney Children's Hospitals Network, to advocate for patients safety for children and their families and New South Wales.
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.
The words we use reflect our attitude and the values we place on the people that we work with and care for. So we can either instil hope and possibility, or low expectation and pessimism. This decreases stigma and distress within the people we work with.
I'm really proud to represent the team at Coffs Harbour Acute Mental Health Unit as a finalist in these awards. Language and communication are the core skills for a contemporary mental health nurse and at Coffs Harbour we continually strive to improve the care that we give our consumers.
Cindy Mundy: About this time last year, we established a task force and subtask force to support the organisation with critical workforce shortage. This entailed putting together a diverse group of skilled people across the district, nursing specialists, recruiting specialists, to grow our pipelines and onboard staff more efficiently, to support managers with the burden of the slow recruitment, and the processes, and to enhance the quality of our candidate care.
Donna Goodwin: We're building relationships with the facility managers, and engaging quickly with the applicants, which has helped us not lose applicants before we even get to interview. They want to know what's happening. They want to know there's somebody they can liaise with and talk to, and we are sort of the mediator in between that, helping the facility manager capture those good potential applicants.
As a finalist, I would feel acknowledged, but also acknowledging the work of all the people that are involved trying to address the critical shortage of nurses and midwives throughout Murrumbidgee Local Health District. Cindy Mundy: The team would feel enormously grateful and very appreciative of the recognition of the hard work.
Dr Karl Pobre: Emergency Departments, like the one at the Children's Hospital at Westmead are fast-paced and complex environments to work and learn in. There's something happening all the time, which is why it makes it a fertile ground for learning. PEMPOWERHOUR is an educational program developed within the Children's Hospital at Westmead Emergency Department, which is learner centred, utilises contemporary learning strategies, and harnesses the interdisciplinary wealth of knowledge in the ED to provide quality education to paediatric trainees.
Dr Shefali Jani: The collaborative and interdisciplinary nature of the program fosters a learning and educational culture within the Emergency Department. We are very proud to create a generation of new doctors who are so passionate about education.
Dr Karl Pobre: As a finalist we feel extremely proud and excited that our hard work and commitment is being recognised and celebrated.
Dr Shefali Jani: We are proud and privileged to be able to deliver this program to our trainees who can then best support the families and children presenting to our Emergency Department.
Todd Tobin: Collaborative care for vulnerable patients is a program focusing on patients with high emergency department utilisation and NSW ambulance utilisation Patients are identified to the patient flow portal and from that patient flow portal analysis the team then work to look at the patient's healthcare utilisation, develop a web of care sitting around the particular patient, look for opportunities of unmet needs to providing care back in the community, and reduce their need for hospital presentation.
Simone Dagg: The impacts of this program are improved patient outcomes for people who are residing in the community. Also, we've seen a reduction in impatient and in ED presentations for this particular group by approximately 46%, and in the group that we compared to there was actually an increase in presentations of approximately 19%. So it's able to provide socially and health-driven healthcare and support services within the community to prevent impacts and to reduce impacts on ED presentation.
Todd Tobin: As a finalist we feel this is great recognition for all the hard work that our team has put in over the last two years to get some great patient outcomes.
Angela Rankin: So Oral Health Goes Virtual allows a patient sitting in a chair in a regional or rural community to access a paediatric dental specialist who's located in Sydney.
There's an opportunity for sharing images, X-rays and also a live feed of the patient's mouth during the consultation, and allows the family to have the conversation with the paediatric specialist and build the rapport with them before they meet the child face to face on a visit to the regional clinic.
Cassandra Lindquist: If we were a finalist for the New South Wales Health Awards, as a clinician, I would feel very proud of all the work that has gone into Oral Health Goes Virtual as we've helped lots of local families achieve access to paediatric specialist Dental Services.
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.
As a finalist, we feel honoured and grateful for the recognition of all of the hard work by thousands of our colleagues who are delivering care to acute stroke patients on the front lines every day.
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. It provides communication strategies in the form of communication sheets for parents and healthcare professionals. It provides medication guidance to ensure the child is kept comfortable.
As the finalist, we feel, and I speak on behalf of the whole team, it is just such a huge honour. This is recognition of a really difficult and uncomfortable topic and as healthcare professionals, we understand that sadly babies and children do die. We can't change that outcome, but what we can do is ensure that families receive the best possible care.
Rachel O'Neill: This project is about patients who have long-term immune conditions and require immunoglobulin treatment, and it's giving them the option to have their treatment at home. We teach patients to do their own infusions at home instead of coming to hospital.
These patients are usually on this treatment for the whole course of their life, and they normally have to come to hospital and have intravenous infusions of the immunoglobulin every three to four weeks. So the impact for these patients is that they now have the independence and the autonomy and the flexibility to control and manage their own condition at home, and they can give themselves their infusions at home.
By partnering with the community pharmacists it offsets the burden for our hospital pharmacist because the dispensing process is quite complex.
If we were a finalist the team would be very excited to share our experiences over the last couple of years, and the knowledge that we've gained in overcoming some challenges that were faced, and that may serve as a blueprint for other LHDs who might be facing the same challenges.
It would also help to embed our project and give all the clinicians and our patients confidence going forward as we prepare to scale up now that we have the process embedded.
Sandra Leon: So our project is really about enabling the care between patients and providers in the cancer services. It enables patients to report physical and psychosocial issues and needs.
Kimberley Williamson: We know there are many aspects in life along with cancer treatment that can affect how a patient tolerates their treatment. So the more we can support their holistic well-being, the better the patients outcomes and experiences.
Karina McCarthy: So taking a more holistic approach to a patient's well-being helps ensure better outcomes and experiences for that patient.
Sandra Leon: As a finalist we feel very proud and humbled given all the wonderful work that's happening out across New South Wales Health
Kimberley Williamson: As a finalist we feel extremely honoured and proud of not only our team at the Cancer Institute New South Wales, but of the cancer services that have worked so closely and passionately with us from the beginning.
Dr Wade Stedman: The ICU follow-up clinic is about identifying and treating vulnerable ICU survivors who've had a critical illness, and we're able to manage their psychological physical and cognitive issues along with their caregivers.
Dr Lachlan Donaldson: The ICU follow-up clinic has an impact for both patients and their family members in that it provides longer term support and recognition that admission to the Intensive Care Unit is hugely traumatic and has specific long-term complications.
It also helps us as a department better partner with our patients and better understand the long-term outcomes of the patients that we often say goodbye to once they leave the Intensive Care Unit. By better understanding how people go in the longer term, it helps us reflect on our own processes and practices and improve them.
Dr Wade Stedman: As a finalist, we feel very excited and flattered to be a part of it, and just great that it's going to give a little bit of extra support and interest in this area of healthcare that we find really, really important ourself.
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.
As a finalist, I am humbled and honoured to be even considered. My passion for rural, regional and remote communities is paramount.
Access and equity to good quality and safe healthcare is important to our consumers.
Everything I do as a consumer advocate is to affect change and improve the health outcomes of our consumers.
Brad Rossiter: Hello, my name's Brad Rossiter. I'm chair of the Eurobodalla Health Services Community Representative Committee, and I'm a very keen and enthusiastic volunteer in our Local Health District, and have been doing this since 2007.
To be a finalist for the New South Wales Health Awards. I would feel incredibly honoured to be recognised by my peers, to be part of such a procedures honour.
Colin Dent: Volunteers at Blacktown and Mount Druitt Hospital provide their services for free to add value to the patient experience in the hospitals. Most of our volunteers feel extremely humble in the work that they're providing.
Barbara Ritchie: I think Betty feels very self-conscious and modest about this award because she's never want to take centre stage.
She's not one to promote herself. She's always been here on our behalf. Working with Betty has been a privilege and an honour.
I admire that lady so much. I am so grateful that she's finally getting this recognition and it makes me proud to be her friend.
As a finalist I think Betty is Very humbled to be chosen for this award. Even though she knows full well how much work she's provided over the many years and how much incredible value she's given. Blacktown hospital and I think she is extremely deserving of this award.