The Planetree Certification is the only industry recognition that lauds excellence in person-centred care. The certification gauges a hospital’s patient-centeredness based on several factors, including patient experience, quality of care, staff engagement, staff retention, and safety culture by scoring a hospital’s efforts on a scale of 1-160 points, with a three-tier recognition system for successful healthcare organizations and to achieve Gold-level certification, a hospital must meet an impressive 90% of the criteria or more.

CHQ became Australia’s first and only hospital to earn a Gold Certification, being evaluated against 26 criteria identified by patients, residents, family members and healthcare professionals as to what matters most to them during a healthcare experience. In this talk, Frank takes us through this journey and outlines to us what a recognized, patient-centred health service looks like and what they are doing differently to achieve such a recognition.

Frank Tracey

Chief Executive
Children’s Health Queensland

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• What does co-design mean to you? What is the difference between co-design and “great” co-design in your opinion?
• Can you share examples of where you’ve seen co-design done well and the impact it created? 
• Let’s look at consumer advisory committees/groups – what does it take to succeed here and what opportunities are you working on? What challenges are you thinking about to ensure these committees bring value to our health system?
• How are you looking to improve measurement of impact and value from consumer engagement?
• How can we build confidence among clinicians and the workforce to drive value from co-design and consumer engagement?

Panellists

Satyan Chari

Program Director - CEQ BridgeLabs
Clinical Excellence Queensland

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Anja Christoffersen

Founder and Director
Champion Health Agency

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Trisha Hansen

Senior Engagement Officer
West Moreton Health

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Dr Adrienne Young

Research Coordinator, Nutrition and Dietetics
Metro North Health

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Jessica Cheers

Experience Design Fellow | Healthcare Improvement Unit
Clinical Excellence Queensland

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Cultural safety is an important foundation for any health service in Australia today and a lot of opportunities exist to improve this particularly for the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people who have significantly lower health outcomes in the state and country when compared to the general population’s health outcomes.

Through Stefan’s work in the Emergency Department at Cairns and Hinterland HHS, novel approaches and resources have been developed to ensure the access-to-care experience for the aboriginal community is transformed for the better. Moreover, they’ve also been recognized as best practice and adopted by HHSs across the state. This talk will see Stefan share his experience and his work to:

• Develop a workforce strategy that includes indigenous people to improve relatability with marginalized communities
• Get prioritization from across medical, admin and nursing staff to learn about culturally sound practices
• Expand focus to improve experience of suicidal and complex aboriginal patient experiences

Stefan Kuiper

Staff Specialist Emergency Physician, Cairns Hospital Emergency Department
Cairns Hospital and Health Service

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The COVID period saw elective surgeries being delayed or put through extended waiting periods. In a bid to improve engagement with this community, the team at HCC led by Casey Windshuttle, saw this as an opportunity to proactively engage this segment of patients and flip a challenging situation into an opportunity – the team devised holistic telehealth risk assessments to get a rounded understanding of the varied health risks associated with obesity, smoking, mental health and more the patients might carry.

They then devise plans and pathways to help these patients build a healthier lifestyle with help from GPs and relevant clinicians. As a result, an everyday health system interaction was transformed into an opportunity for behaviour change. In this talk, learn how the team:

• provide targeted, evidence-based wellness advice to patients with complex health needs sitting on the elective surgery waitlist
• developed coaching advice and healthcare pathways to support sustainable behaviour change 
• leveraging standardized wellness data to identify community health risk trends and educate clinicians on holistic patient wellness
• taking steps to build a digital-first, multi-channel patient engagement strategy to scale value from the “Patient Wellness” initiative

Claudia Regan-Knights

Health Promotion Officer
Health Contact Centre Queensland Health

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Christine Petrie has been instrumental in coordinating four successive consumer and community engagement strategies for Metro North Health since 2012. The “Collaborating in Health Strategy” is the latest edition. This strategy places an emphasis on cultural change rather than policies and processes which whilst important, can unintentionally reduce engagement visions to box ticking exercises and sustain a general lack of awareness across staff around the “why” consumer and community engagement is pivotal to delivering accessible, safe and high-quality services. Based in genuine empathy yet ambitious by being evidenced based in its evaluation, this strategy is helping Metro North Health chart a path towards a future where patients and communities become true partners in shaping healthcare services. Christine will share with us:

• Practical tips for involving consumers in health service planning and governance
• Moving away from jargon and tying the strategy to a purpose all stakeholders can relate to – why culture trumps protocols and checklists
• Creating a support system to sustainably see staff and consumers adopt shared decision making and co-design in health
• Developing KPIs that improve evaluation and linkage of consumer engagement strategies with impact on care outcome

Christine Petrie

Manager Metro North Engage
Metro North Health

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The language of co-design is being tightly woven into the fabric of healthcare improvement. However, “true” co-design remains somewhat elusive, leading to approaches that are more consultative than deeply collaborative. This talk will focus on the design of co-design, exploring creative, playful, and immersive methods that can be used to create space for rich discussions and creative co-production in healthcare.

This exploration will be led by Jessica Cheers - an experience designer, design educator, PhD candidate and play enthusiast. Jess has spent the last year with the Healthcare Improvement Unit (HIU) as their first embedded Design Fellow, and was previously part of the HEAL Bridge Lab connecting QUT designers with health professionals across the state, adapting design methods to diverse healthcare contexts. She will draw on examples from her work and research at the intersection of design and healthcare, as well as speaking more broadly to the importance of these rich interdisciplinary collaborations in crafting meaningful, sustainable and reimagined healthcare experiences.

Jessica Cheers

Experience Design Fellow | Healthcare Improvement Unit
Clinical Excellence Queensland

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Usha noticed that both internationally and locally, prehabilitation efforts made with patients due to undergo surgery generally had low patient uptake and often, were unsuccessful in achieving their outcomes. This is her story of taking matters into her own hands to put consumers at the heart of the process and drive change. It is also a story to showcase that anyone within healthcare can lead change to benefit patients and transform traditional engagement with healthcare.

With over 70 bowel cancer and cardiac surgery patients taken through this process backed by a seed grant from Metro North Health, a multidisciplinary prehabilitation approach was developed and co-designed with patients which saw 100% compliance from patients and benefits were not only through patient feedback but also early positives around clinical outcomes around length of stay, post surgery complications and more. Hear from Usha:

• How to change the messaging and involve consumers to build literacy and take ownership of their general health and wellbeing to reduce surgery complications and risks
• Approaching the board to secure funding and making a case to fund a co-design approach for patient prehabilitation
• Taking a multidisciplinary approach across physiotherapy, social worker, dieticians, psychologists and clinical staff to holistic assess and support patient prehabilitation outcomes
• The need for cultural and system change to support a patient-centred health system

Usha Gurunathan

Staff Anaesthetist
Prince Charles Hospital

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