Bernard Coren
NSW Ambulance Service Planning utilises population based health service planning principles tailored for mobile health care for identification of future workforce and infrastructure requirements to efficiently meet patient need and create a safer workplace. This work has supported successful funding for metropolitan and regional staffing enhancements and new stations under the SWIFT program. Service Planning projects future demand using contemporary incident data sets mapped by location, time of day and response priority combined with population projections in custom age
groups. Consideration is given to metropolitan operating environments as defined by high activity and resource mobility, flexibility and intra network support, multiple patient referral and transport options, Emergency Departments acting as proxy response locations and complex station interrelationships and support for meeting network demand. Regional operating environments are defined by hub resources providing significant support to satellite towns, a defined response network with increasing prevalence of satellite to hub for transports, a changing regional healthcare landscape with increasing consolidation of medical specialties in regional cities, increased adoption of technology to improve aspects of regional healthcare and statutory requirements to provide emergency and critical care functions for all locations within NSW. Identification of resource requirements was supported by simulation modelling for identifying gaps in coverage including operational parameters such as dispatch rules, crib breaks, shift overruns, dynamic deployment, diverts, and the hospital matrix. The SWIFT enhancements and new stations will enable NSW Ambulance to efficiently meet demand into the future and reduce the requirement to access the discretionary time of the clinical workforce.
Biography:
Bernard Coren is Associate Director of Service Planning at NSW Ambulance. Bernard’s career history includes clinical workforce, operational management, program management and service planning roles within NSW Ambulance.