Northern Health values your suggestions and ideas, and we want to work with you to improve our services for our staff, patients and community.

In 2022, we’ve had two different campaigns running to gather and action these suggestions and ideas.

The COVID and Our Workforce campaign focused on staff suggestions to assist Northern Health address challenges such as environment or workforce during the peak of the COVID-19 pandemic.

“The workforce idea came from the Hospital Incident Management team and numerous ideas have now been implemented,” explains Jason Cirone, Director, Workforce Sustainability.

Some of the ideas submitted to our People and Culture team included: Administering staff COVID vaccines on-site, introducing a secure ventilated area for staff self-testing, and providing additional personnel to help our staff on the wards.

“From the Ideascale initiative, we received a broad range of suggestions, with initiatives across ward levels, as well as some broader strategies to assist staff with their day to day experience at the hospital. One of the suggestions was to administer COVID booster shots at our campuses, and we were able to do that just before the mandated final date for boosters. We were also able to establish a safe self-testing area for our staff, as well as deliver free parking during February at all of our campuses,” Jason added.

“Some of the suggestions were around providing help to our ward staff, and we were able to respond to that by implementing a non-clinical ward assistant workforce and employed just over 100 assistants across many of our high-need areas in Epping, Bundoora and Broadmeadows.”

As the ‘COVID and our Workforce’ initiative is now closed, staff are encouraged to think big, start small, move fast and submit their ‘Big Idea’ to our Project Management team.

The Big Idea campaign is seeking ideas from all Northern Health staff that can improve the health service, both clinical and non-clinical, which align with our values of safe, kind and together.

“We’re looking for all types of ideas, from small changes to big innovations. We appreciate people are tired after the past two years, and we’re looking for ideas to help make this time easier for patients and staff,” said Cassie Bramston, Project Manager.

“The Transformation Unit will be there to support the projects in every step of the process. To help generate ideas, we are running workshops in innovation and problem-solving, along with one-on-one coaching sessions to help refine, and in-person meet ups on each campus,” Cassie added.

The team is also running a Big Idea Roadshow – a face-to-face meet up with staff where you can discuss issues, ideas, solutions, and brainstorm together.

Dates for the sessions and roadshows are below, or you can submit your idea online via Ideascale.