2025 CAA Awards for Excellence Program

2025 CAA Awards for Excellence

Highlighting innovation in our industry

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Let’s Celebrate

The Council of Ambulance Authorities (CAA) is excited to welcome you and showcase the entrants and finalists in the 2025 Awards for Excellence. These projects stage the achievements, victories and innovations across the Australasian Ambulance Sector. This year, we received over 45 submissions, demonstrating the remarkable growth, dedication and ingenuity of ambulance professionals throughout our region.

The 18th annual CAA Awards for Excellence received submissions spanning a comprehensive array of judging categories, reflecting the diverse and dynamic character of our industry. Entries addressed topics ranging from clinical practice and patient care to leadership and technological advancement, collectively demonstrating the sector’s unwavering commitment to continual improvement and innovation.

The CAA Awards for Excellence not only honour exceptional achievements but also provide a valuable forum for the exchange of best practices and the encouragement of continued innovation within the ambulance sector. We look forward to celebrating these accomplishments and highlighting the exemplary work being undertaken by ambulance professionals across Australasia.

We extend our sincere appreciation to all individuals and teams who invested considerable effort in preparing and submitting their projects and initiatives. The exceptional standard of entries this year presented a significant challenge for our esteemed panel of judges in the selection process.

Once again, congratulations and thank you to all our entrants, and to everyone who has participated in the 2025 CAA Awards for Excellence. Your contributions continue to elevate the standards of the Australasian ambulance sector and improve the lives of the communities we serve.

Mojca Bizjak-Mikic Interim Chief Executive, The Council of Ambulance Authorities

Our Judges

Jennie Helmer

Chief Operations Officer, BC Emergency Health Services

Jennie has over 30 years of experience working in emergency health services. She has held various positions as an Advanced Care Paramedic, Research Lead, Director of Operations, and is now the Executive Director of Emergency Dispatch, Clinical Operations for the British Columbia Emergency Health Services in Canada. Jennie has a Master’s in Education, a Master’s in Business Administration, and is currently enrolled in a PhD at the School of Population and Public Health at UBC.

Jennie is also a Sessional Instructor of BC Department of Paramedicine and journal reviewer. Jennie has over 15 peer reviewed academic publications, with areas of interest in new models of out-of-hospital service delivery and the use of innovative technologies to improve EMS dispatch and deployment.

Associate Professor

Freddy Lippert MD

CEO, Copenhagen Emergency Medical Services

International Chief Medical Officer at Falck, and Associate Professor, University of Copenhagen, Denmark

Co-founder, EMS Europe and the Global Resuscitation Alliance

Founding member of EMS Europe, The Global Resuscitation Alliance, and advisor to the Chinese Global Alliance. With over 25 years in emergency care, including 10 years as CEO of EMS in Copenhagen, he has extensive experience as a clinician, medical director, and researcher, with a special interest in implementation.

The EMS Copenhagen covers a population of 1.7 million, that is, one third of the Danish population.

The EMS Copenhagen includes the following: Emergency Medical Dispatch, ambulance services including physician manned mobile critical care units, psychiatric mobile unit, a medical hotline 24/7, responsibility and coordination of medical preparedness on behalf of all hospitals in the Capital Region.

Associate Professor

Belinda Flanagan (PhD)

Head of School, School of Paramedicine, University of Tasmania

Belinda is the Head of School at the University of Tasmania, leading the first School of Paramedicine in an Australian university. She has worked as a Paramedic & Registered Nurse/Midwife for 25 years.

Belinda collaborates with ambulance services in guideline development, education, research, and clinical governance.

Neil Kirby

Previous CEO, Ambulance Tasmania

Industry Ambassador, Corvanta Neil has been involved within the ambulance sector since 1978. He played a significant role in the evolution of ambulance education in Queensland, introducing the Associate Diploma of Applied Science, the precursor to the modern-day Degree programs, and has a passion for rural and remote service, the subject of his Masters dissertation.

He gained a NHMRC grant to undertake extensive research on the subject in Canada. He has served as Deputy Commissioner for QAS, Director of Operations for the Dubai Ambulance in UAE for eight years, and Chief Executive of Ambulance Tasmania.

He was a founding member of the International Roundtable on Community Paramedicine (IRCP) and recently joined in the 20th anniversary of that gathering in Quebec Canada. His passion for ambulance continues as he consults with industry.

Jason Killens

Chair, Association of Ambulance Chief Executives

Chief Executive Officer, London Ambulance Service

Jason has worked internationally as the Chief Executive of the South Australian Ambulance Service, prior to which he held various senior leadership roles in the London Ambulance Service including Executive Director of Operations.

With nearly three decades of service in the ambulance sector and having commenced his career as an Emergency Medical Technician, Jason is passionate about the delivery of high quality, safe and effective patient care in partnership with a workforce of highly skilled, engaged and healthy people.

Jason is an Honorary Professor at Swansea University school of Human and Health Sciences and was awarded the Kings Ambulance Service Medal (KAM) in the 2023 Birthday Honours List. Jason assumed the role of Chair of the Association of Ambulance Chief Executives in September 2024.

Adjunct Professor

Tony Walker

Professor of Paramedicine, Monash University

Vice Chancellor’s Strategic Fellow Clinical Associate, Victoria University

Professor Tony Walker ASM has nearly four decades of experience in ambulance and emergency services, most recently as the Chief Executive Officer of Ambulance Victoria.

Tony is a registered paramedic and Life Member and Fellow of the Australasian College of Paramedicine. He holds adjunct appointments as Professor of Paramedicine at Monash University and Professor and Vice Chancellor’s Strategic Fellow at Victoria University, and is a non-executive director of Life Saving Victoria, Prostate Cancer Foundation of Australia, and TLC for Kids.

Since retiring from Ambulance Victoria, Tony has remained actively engaged as an academic, management consultant, and nonexecutive director, allowing him to continue his passion for supporting the community and improving health and emergency services.

Our Judges

Tony Ahern

Board Member, St John WA

Board member, WA Primary Health Alliance

Tony Ahern joined St John Ambulance WA in 1973 as a 15-yearold cadet. In 1980 he moved from being a first aid volunteer to career ambulance officer.

In 1989 he moved into accounting and computing services taking a lead role in modernising St John’s administrative and financial systems while completing his Master of Business degree in Information Systems. In 1995, Tony was appointed to the position of Finance Director on the Executive, was made Deputy Chief Executive Officer in 2000 and Chief Executive Officer in 2006.

At a national level he chaired the Strategic Business Advisory Committee of the CAA for over a decade and was CAA Chairman from 2010 to 2013. Tony retired from the role of CEO at St John WA in 2018 and served on the St John WA Board from 2019 to 2023. Tony is a current Board member of the WA Primary Health Alliance.

Adjunct Professor Vivienne Tippett

Head of School, Queensland University of Technology, Retd

Adjunct Professor Vivienne Tippett has extensive experience as a researcher, author and consultant in health systems, with a special interest in emergency pre-hospital, disaster and emergency health systems. Her work has been recognised with an OAM for services to medical education (2018) and a Distinguished Service medal from Queensland Ambulance Service (2012) for services to paramedic research.

Between 2013 and 2021 she was Lead Researcher for the Warnings and Communication Theme of the Bushfire and Natural Hazards CRC which was recognised with a CRC Association national award for research innovation (2019).

AWARDS FOR EXCELLENCE

Finalists

Hato Hone St John

Sovereign AI and Automated Auditing: The Future of Clinical Auditing

St John WA

Implementation of a Dedicated Prehospital Clinical Incident Management System

32 Excellence in Staff Development

Entrants

Hato Hone St John CHOGM

NSW Ambulance

NSW Ambulance Station Manager Familiarisation Program

Ambulance Victoria

AV Membership Scheme Donations Process

Hato Hone St John

Strengthening Data Resilience at Hato Hone St John.

Hato Hone St John Med Scan

Hato Hone St John

ReportALL Machine Learning

NSW Ambulance

NSW Ambulance eManual Incident Transfer Solution

NSW Ambulance

The Frequent Caller App: A One-stop Digital Solution for Managing Frequent Ambulance Callers

NSW Ambulance

Aeromedical Remote Piloted

SA Ambulance

Critical Systems, XALT

The National St John Ambulance Service of Papua New Guinea PNG Snake Bite Partnership

26 Excellence in Clinical Practice

Finalists

Ambulance Victoria

The Safe Treatment of Atrial Fibrillation in the CommunitY (STAY)

NSW Ambulance PRECARE

St John WA

Extended Care Paramedics Pilot

NSW Ambulance

LGBTIQ+ Inclusive Practice Learning Modules

NSW Ambulance Women in Leadership Development Plan

NSW Ambulance

NSWA Mandatory Clinical Professional Development

SA Ambulance Service

Quality Improvement Program (QI)

SA Ambulance Service Transforming Emergency Management Training

Finalists

Ambulance Victoria

Enhancing Resuscitation Quality Through Data-driven Feedback

Hato Hone St John

Ambulance Response to Active Armed Offender: SOP and CCE

St John WA

Deliver Sector-Recognised Family and Domestic Violence

Informed Education to Emergency Responders Across All of WA

46 Excellence in Patient Care

Entrants

Ambulance Tasmania

Raizer II Lifter Program

NSW Ambulance

VCCC Interhospital Transfer Surveillance

Queensland Ambulance Service

QAS Inter-Facility Transfer Priority

SA Ambulance Service

Clinical Risk Stratification Procedure & Dashboard

Finalists

Ambulance Tasmania

Ambulance Tasmania

Palliative Care Project (Enhancing Paramedic Palliative Care Initiative)

Ambulance Victoria

Paramedics Exposure Analysis (PEA)

SA Ambulance Service

Patient Transport Service

56 Excellence in Leadership

Entrants

Ambulance Tasmania

Your Say - Ambulance

Tasmania's New Employee & Volunteer Engagement Survey

NSW Ambulance

Control Centre Reform Communications Team Leader Project

NSW Ambulance

Southern Control CentreAdherence Project

NSW Ambulance

VCCC Support to Major Incidents and Extreme Weather Events

Queensland Ambulance Service The Patient Experience Project (PEP)

Wellington Free Ambulance Leadership in Growing our Communities' Lifesaving Capabilities

Finalists

Ambulance Victoria

Creating a Communication Accessible Service - AV's Disability Inclusion Program

SA Ambulance Service Volunteer Insights Survey

St John WA

Support for Perimenopause and Menopause in the Workplace

68 Excellence in Mental Health and Wellbeing Entrants

Ambulance Tasmania

Ambulance Tasmania

SitRep App - Graduate Wellbeing Initiative

NSW Ambulance

NSW Ambulance Women’s Health Programs

NSW Ambulance

NSW Ambulance Shift Workers Wellbeing Guide

Finalists

Ambulance Victoria

Suicide Intervention Response & Engagement Network (SIREN)

St John WA

Injury Management Support — Early Intervention Physiotherapy Program

The National St John Ambulance Service of Papua New Guinea 2030 Staff Health Strategy

76 Star Award

Principal Partners

Major Sponsor

Category Sponsors

Thank you to the following for your contributions and commitment to both the CAA and your respective organisations.

Howard Wren Former Chief Officer, ACT Ambulance Service

Jane Miller Former Chief Executive, Ambulance Victoria

Matthew Cannon Former Chief Executive The National St John Ambulance Service of Papua New Guinea

David Waters Former Chief Executive, The Council of Ambulance Authorities

Jordan Emery Former Chief Executive, Ambulance Tasmania

Technology Excellence in

Recognising innovation or capability in the fields of equipment, communications, and information systems. When making their submission to this category, each service is encouraged to reflect on how their organisation has used technology in the past twelve months to enhance patient outcomes, staff performance or response capacity.

Sponsored by

Excellence in Technology

AV Membership Scheme Donations Process

Ambulance Victoria

Team: Jacob James, Muhammad Satter

Ambulance Victoria (AV) is committed to providing high-quality pre-hospital emergency treatment to the Victorian community; however, to continue and enhance their services, AV recognised the need for an additional revenue stream that would facilitate donor contributions in a simple and seamless manner. Additionally, AV sought to align with their strategic goal of operating as an efficient organisation with a sustainable footprint.

In response to these needs, AV, in collaboration with its service provision partner, Startek Australia, launched an innovative project to introduce micro-donations and sustainability contributions. This initiative was designed to provide AV Members with easy options to contribute financially to AV’s general donation fund, as well as support sustainability initiatives.

The micro-donations feature allows AV Members and donors to make small but impactful contributions when interacting with AV, particularly during membership new joins and renewal payments. These micro-donations accumulate over time, providing a steady stream of supplementary funding to help AV continue delivering critical emergency services across Victoria.

The sustainability contributions initiative provides AV Members with the option to support environmentally sustainable practices within the organisation. By opting to add a small sustainability contribution when making their membership payment, individuals can directly support AV’s efforts to reduce its environmental footprint and invest in greener, more efficient operational strategies.

To bring this project to life, AV’s Membership department, Startek Australia, and key stakeholders — including Westpac, PayPal, AV’s Sustainability team, the Donations team, and Finance—collaborated extensively. Their combined expertise and commitment ensured that the project was completed within a three-month timeframe and at a remarkably low cost of under $30,000. Given that this investment equates to less than five weeks’ worth of donations, the project is expected to provide a high return on investment in the long term.

The success of this initiative highlights AV’s and Startek’s shared passion to process improvement, innovation, and community engagement. By integrating micro-donations and sustainability contributions into the membership process, AV has created a practical and sustainable means of enhancing financial support while fostering environmental responsibility. This project not only benefits AV and supports its strategic plan but also allows the Victorian community the opportunity to support emergency medical services and sustainability efforts, ensuring AV is well-positioned to provide world-class emergency care to Victorians now and into the future.

Excellence in Technology Strengthening Data Resilience at Hato Hone St John.

Hato Hone St John

Team: Andrew Fletcher, Hui Ly, Saiyad Rahim, Kelsey Mitchell, Sarah Ellisdon, Simon Lamb, Zee Daim, Tin Latt

In late 2018, Hato Hone St John undertook a strategic shift in its IT infrastructure, bringing its corporate virtual machine (VM) environment in-house onto St John’s private cloud. This transition marked a significant departure from Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) and Backup-as-a-Service (BaaS), ensuring greater control, security, and efficiency in managing critical data.

Building on this foundation, in 2024, we executed a major infrastructure refresh of our clinical stack, which included a data centre migration. As part of this modernisation effort, we upgraded our Veeam Data Platform instances to leverage the latest advancements in backup and recovery technology. Our commitment to data protection has since expanded, broadening the scope of our Veeam solutions to ensure comprehensive coverage for all critical data assets.

We now utilise:

• Veeam Data Platform

• Veeam Data Cloud for Microsoft 365

• Veeam Backup for Salesforce

• Veeam Backup for Microsoft Azure

This holistic approach enables us to safeguard essential ambulance services, ensuring operational continuity and resilience across our organisation. The implementation of these solutions has improved data recovery times and minimised service disruptions.

Our success story has been recognised by Veeam and is featured on the Veeam website as a customer story. Additionally, Hato Hone St John has been honoured as a finalist in the Veeam Data Resilience Awards 2025 –Business Impact Category, highlighting the significant impact of our data protection strategy in supporting emergency healthcare services.

Excellence in Technology Med Scan

Hato Hone St John

Team: Jon Moores, Mike Casey, Gabrielle Wildbore, Hannah Bolleboom, Stephen Keith, Reuben Merrett, Jayden Strickland, Jess Hill, Chris Marr, Paul Topping, Ashleigh Gaffaney, Mikayla Nicolson

Before 2024, Hato Hone St John (HHSJ) used a manual paper-based system to capture and maintain compliance of controlled and designated prescription medications, a legal requirement in the management of these medicines.

Controlled and designated prescription medications would be recorded manually on one of six different drug registers. Basic tasks such as stock-taking and recording errors were manual, requiring multiple supporting forms, resulting in limited compliance despite the development of educational content, policy, and processes. Results from a clinical audit in 2021 revealed that compliance levels within these processes did not align with regulatory obligations or HHSJ policy, posing substantial risks, including the potential for fraudulent medication use. A new and improved Medicine Management solution known as Med Scan was drafted, and the nationwide rollout concluded in August of 2024.

Derived from Microsoft PowerApps, Med Scan was designed and developed in-house by a small project team. The design, production and implementation of Med Scan was at minimal cost to HHSJ compared to off-the-shelf solutions. The in-house design also allows Med Scan to be tailored to HHSJ’s specific needs, with feedback, enhancements and future developments easily implemented.

In summary, Med Scan Mobile allows frontline staff to electronically record the movement of controlled and designated prescription medicines to and from the drug safes, along with other tasks required in the management of these medicines. Using a mobile device, staff scan a unique QR code to access a drug safe, then select from the different medicine movements to log a transaction.

A web-based application, ‘Med Scan Dashboard’, has been developed for managers and auditors to use on a desktop. Allowing managers to perform safe oversight, monitor drug registers, and perform user audits, among other functions. Managers no longer need to go to individual stations or rely solely on personnel to raise medication errors. Safe oversight can now occur at any location with the Med Scan Dashboard displaying real-time data and alerts.

Med Scan has revolutionised Medicine Management of controlled and designated prescription medications within HHSJ. Compliance has improved and is easily monitored through live data collection displayed in Power BI reports. Additionally, external audit findings from October 2024 demonstrate significant improvement in policy and regulation adherence. It envisions the ongoing development of Med Scan to encompass all aspects of medicine management as a more sustainable and efficient platform, ensuring that organisational and legislative obligations are achieved.

Excellence in Technology ReportALL Machine Learning

Hato Hone St John

Team: Jonathan Moores, Nicola Collins, Vivian Zhang, Isidro Medina

Hato Hone St John (HHSJ) has developed an Artificial Intelligence (AI) solution capable of reviewing and analysing all patient safety incident (PSI) entries in our incident management system, ReportALL. This AI solution identifies reports that may meet the threshold for a SAC 1 (severity assessment code, (SAC)) or SAC 2 incident, ensuring early triage and assessment of adverse events to streamline incident triage and maintain external notification requirements. Previously, the high volume of SAC 3, SAC 4, and near-miss reports made detecting these sentinel events a challenge for Clinical Safety and Risk personnel, akin to finding a needle in a haystack. Up to 500 reports can be received in the Patient Safety Incident module of ReportALL in a month. Clinical safety and risk personnel would be required to individually read each text record and make an initial subjective assessment of event acuity.

The Severity Prediction model leverages two natural language processing (NLP) models specialised for clinical healthcare (ClinicalBERT) and scientific text (SciSpacy), to extract key phrases from incident descriptions using natural language processing (NLP) libraries. It then applies gradient boosting trees, which is an ensemble machine learning algorithm, to classify the severity of each incident based on scores assigned to learned keywords. Each incident receives a score between 1 and 5, with high scores indicating a greater likelihood of being classified as a SAC 1 or 2 incident.

The model output is integrated into a Power BI dashboard, enabling Clinical Safety and Risk personnel to access and action machine learnt suggestions as needed. Alternatively, they can rely on a weekly report subscription, which provides an overview of all scores assigned to reports received in the past seven days.

With its current training, the model achieves an accuracy score of 87% (with further tuning and regular training) and effectively highlights reports that the Clinical Safety and Risk team should prioritise for review. To date, in the 2024/2025 financial year, we have maintained a 100% notification compliance score.

Excellence in Technology NSW Ambulance eManual Incident Transfer Solution

NSW Ambulance

Team: Melissa Willis

NSW Ambulance is implementing an electronic solution to address the issue of Triple Zero (000) call taking during a Computer Aided Dispatch (CAD) outage. The solution will replace handwritten paper log slips for the recording of Triple Zero (000) calls with an electronic form that follows the call-taking flow of ProQA.

Once completed by an Emergency Medical Call Taker, this form can then be printed in any Control Centre, negating the need for the manual passing of incidents if they are received in a different Control Centre from where they are dispatched. This also adds a level of redundancy for business continuity if a particular Control Centre is unable to dispatch for a period of time during manual operations.

The solution also includes dashboards and metrics on the number of incidents received during the manual operations period and an archiving solution that will allow retrospective review of any incident that was processed during the period of the outage. The eManual Incident Transfer (eMIT) system leverages the Microsoft Power Platform and, through the support of a Microsoft partner, the project team have developed a solution that is easy and intuitive for staff to use, which was especially important given the system is only utilised occasionally. It will be accessible on the corporate network but can also be utilised on a mobile phone on 4G/5G in the case of a catastrophic network outage, providing further redundancy for Triple Zero (000).

Excellence in Technology

The Frequent Caller App: A One-stop Digital Solution for Managing Frequent Ambulance Callers

NSW Ambulance

Team: Dr Zhixian Sui

Frequent ambulance users, defined as individuals who make ten or more calls within a six-month period, represent a small but disproportionately high-demand group, putting a significant strain on NSW Ambulance resources. These patients often have unresolved health or social needs and may not receive the most appropriate care, which leads to higher healthcare costs and poor clinical outcomes.

The NSW Ambulance Frequent User Management Program addresses this issue, but its effectiveness relies on accessible, accurate, and insightful data. A comprehensive, digital analytical tool is needed to accurately identify these patients, provide aggregated data across various levels, and offer detailed case-by-case insights.

Historically, patient information was aggregated using complex Excel spreadsheets with macros, which were cumbersome and prone to error. As the dataset grew larger, the time spent maintaining these spreadsheets also increased, leading to inefficiencies and operational challenges.

To improve this process, the Frequent Caller App was developed by the Health Data Intelligence Team at NSW Ambulance. This app consolidates data from three key sources: billing information, Computer Aided Dispatch (CAD), and Electronic Management Record (eMR).

By integrating these data sources into an interactive Power BI dashboard, the app allows users to view aggregated data (e.g., frequent caller trends by area or time), drill down to individual cases, and analyse patientspecific information. This provides actionable insights for the Frequent User Management Team and other NSW Ambulance paramedics to design more targeted care plans for these patients.

The app’s features enable the team to identify trends, track the use of restricted medications, and assess clinical risks such as mental health challenges, ensuring that patients receive more tailored, effective care. It empowers paramedics and healthcare professionals to communicate efficiently, streamline resource allocation and ultimately reduce the reliance on emergency services for non-acute needs.

With a user-friendly interface and the ability to share key insights with other health sectors, the Frequent Caller App enables a more proactive, individualised approach to managing frequent users, ultimately leading to better clinical outcomes and more sustainable use of ambulance services.

Excellence in Technology

Aeromedical Remote Piloted Aircraft Systems

NSW Ambulance

Team: Cameron Edgar

A trial of a renewable energy-powered RPAS system can reduce or replace helicopter flight hours and assist NSW Health in transitioning towards a high-quality, low-carbon health system. This renewable energypowered RPAS system can also improve patient outcomes and enhance the safety of the operational crew. The project consisted of trialling two different low-carbon RPAS solutions to support NSW Ambulance Aeromedical Operations and the training of staff to support this.

Excellence in Technology Critical Systems, XALT Integration Engine

SA Ambulance Service

Team: Duncan Margetts, Kestrel Blackmore, Jerry He, Steve Jones, Mark Lindner

Effective emergency response relies on seamless information flow and rapid decision-making, and a Computer-Aided Dispatch (CAD) system that lends itself to agile modification.

At SA Ambulance Service (SAAS), our CAD system is the backbone of emergency resource allocation; however, what we needed was the ability to programmatically interact with events in order to automate key decisions and proactively support frontline responders. This limitation affected not only operational efficiency but also response accuracy and crew safety.

To address these challenges, we implemented the XALT Integration Engine, a powerful middleware platform that enables real-time data exchange, automation, and system interoperability. By integrating Xalt, we have added substantial improvements to our CAD system that were not possible before this project.

This project enabled real-time programmatic value-add to active Triple Zero (000) events, which directly improved Crew Safety, Patient Safety and response efficiency.

Through this project, SAAS has created a more intelligent, responsive, and automated dispatch environment, reducing manual workloads, mitigating safety risks, and ensuring that critical information reaches the right personnel at the right time. This project not only benefits frontline paramedics and dispatchers but also improves overall patient care across South Australia.

Excellence in Technology Sovereign AI and Automated Auditing: The Future of Clinical Auditing

Hato Hone St John

Team: Kirsty Reeker, Jon Moores

The Emergency Ambulance Service (EAS) in Aotearoa, New Zealand (AoNZ), interacts with nearly 700,000 patients annually. This includes primary and secondary triage and face-to-face patient contacts. Hato Hone St John (HHSJ) generates 431,000 electronic patient records (ePRFs) from face-to-face patient contacts. Clinical audit and peer review are essential for ensuring safe, effective care, quality improvements, and meeting contractual, accreditation, and legislative requirements. A volunteerbased review process currently reviews approximately 5% of these ePRFs. HHSJ sought to expand this process to help align with safety, quality, and compliance targets. Generative AI presents a transformative opportunity to enhance clinical audit compliance, effectiveness, and efficiency, whilst also providing routine feedback across more clinical records to improve the quality of patient care and support clinicians.

The HHSJ Clinical Governance team initiated a Proof of Concept (POC) with an external provider, utilising Generative AI to audit simulated cases based on the “Falls” Clinical Practice Guideline (CPG). A specialised bespoke large language model (LLM) was developed to align with HHSJ’s CPGs and Clinical Audit protocols and underpin the machine learning platform. This was built from the ground up as a sovereign platform with appropriate safeguards to protect patient data and meet all regulatory requirements for the storage, transmission and machine learning of hosted data.

Following trials and learning, generative AI was successfully able to process clinical records, producing insightful clinical audits that provide accurate feedback to personnel. The LLM’s capabilities can potentially be expanded to include peer review of audio records and serve as a foundation for the development of advanced clinical decision support tools.

This pioneering LLM marks a significant advancement in clinical governance and is the only dedicated pre-hospital LLM to review and process clinical records. Its implementation will enhance patient safety, optimise audit accuracy, and support data-driven decision-making, reinforcing HHSJ’s commitment to delivering high-quality healthcare.

Through strategic collaboration, rigorous data security measures, and advanced AI training methodologies, this project successfully developed a highly specialised LLM capable of peer-reviewing ePRFs against established clinical guidelines. The demonstration of this technology represents a transformative step forward in automated clinical auditing and AI-assisted healthcare governance.

This isn’t just an AI upgrade—it’s a transformative shift in how ambulance services and broader operations function, setting a new standard for innovation in the industry.

Excellence in Technology Implementation of a Dedicated Prehospital Clinical Incident Management System

St John WA

Team: Lauren Davids, Jess Eddy, Camilla Quiceno, Ciaran Voyce

Across the ambulance sector, clinical incidents—where care delivery systems falter and lead to patient harm— are often complex and require thorough investigation and learning. St John WA (SJWA) has overhauled its organisation-wide clinical reporting system to improve incident analysis, enhance learning, and strengthen a positive safety culture.

SJWA’s Patient Safety and Quality (PSQ) team has developed and implemented a bespoke Clinical Incident Management System (CIMS), marking a major shift in ambulance incident management. The system enables continuous service improvement through advanced data utilisation, targeted interventions, and measurable safety culture growth. It captures incident data and integrates with business reporting, using MyOSH’s platform to support real-time visibility and assignment of actions.

Key innovations include:

• Clinical data architecture designed for ambulance services.

• Integrated workflow access for multiple stakeholders.

• Business intelligence integration for advanced analytics.

• Systematic recommendation tracking with clear accountability.

• Cloud-based access for mobile teams.

• Role-based security controls for sensitive data.

The system’s development involved extensive audits, regulatory reviews, and user evaluations. A robust consultation process engaged clinicians, Clinical Quality Managers, and Business Intelligence specialists to ensure system-wide relevance.

Implementation featured parallel systems during transition and evidence-based taxonomy design. A multidisciplinary team, supported by the PSQ Committee, oversaw the process.

Post-implementation, SJWA has seen marked gains in classification precision, analytics, and operational efficiency. The CIMS supports sophisticated thematic analysis, particularly useful in identifying patterns such as medication-related errors specific to ambulance settings.

Its cloud architecture and user-centred design have enhanced accessibility across the workforce, boosting transparency in incident management. The system supports rapid reporting, timely triage, in-depth analysis, and proactive incident prevention.

These changes have transformed SJWA’s approach from a retrospective administrative model to a forwardlooking clinical governance system, using technology to improve safety, reporting, and decision-making.

Excellence in Technology PNG Snake Bite Partnership

The National St John Ambulance Service of Papua New Guinea

Team: Kate Datson, Liggie Kare, Andrew Maru, Arabella Koliwan, Matthew Cannon

The PNG Snakebite Partnership, delivered by National St John Ambulance (NStJA), is transforming snakebite care in one of the world’s most snakebite-affected countries. Snakebite envenomation is a medical emergency that disproportionately impacts children, farmers, and rural workers in Papua New Guinea, where healthcare access is already limited. Without rapid treatment with antivenom, envenomed patients can die within hours — or face lifelong disability.

In March 2024, NStJA assumed full operational responsibility for the PNG Snakebite Partnership from its previous academic custodians. Leveraging its established clinical networks, logistical capacity, and frontline reputation, St John launched a nationwide program focused on equitable access, clinical training, and disease surveillance.

The project ensures lifesaving antivenom reaches health facilities across 14 provinces, while more than 887 healthcare workers have been trained in evidence-based snakebite management. By embedding clinical education into routine ambulance outreach and health facility visits, the program builds long-term confidence and capacity within PNG’s health system.

Through the integration of GIS mapping and Power BI dashboards, the team can now visualise every snakebite. Each case is reported via KoboToolbox—a mobile data platform that informs national planning, stock resupply, and training priorities. This digital transformation was led and maintained entirely by the St John team.

Additional innovations include school-based prevention education, a mobile clinical training unit, and a community educator reservist program, engaging local champions to bust myths and promote safe first aid.

In 2025, the team will launch a national digital learning platform, supported by translated videos and quickreference guides for rural clinicians.

The PNG Snakebite Partnership has emerged as a replicable model for delivering essential emergency care in hard-to-reach settings. It shows how an ambulance service can lead to health system strengthening, bring equity to neglected communities, and deliver life-saving interventions that are cost-effective, evidence-based, and locally driven.

A digital solution designed specifically for Ambulance and Emergency Ser vices to safely and efficiently manage Controlled Drugs

Clinical Practice Excellence in

Recognising innovation or capability in the fields of skills mix, pharmacology, and clinical intervention as they relate to patient treatments and outcomes. When making their submission to this category, each service is encouraged to reflect on how their organisation has excelled in clinical practice with breakthrough moments that saw cutting edge techniques implemented to revolutionise the world of paramedicine.

Sponsored by

Excellence in Clinical Practice

The Safe Treatment of Atrial Fibrillation in the CommunitY (STAY)

Ambulance Victoria

Team: Daniel Opoku Okyere, Emily Mahony, Dion Stub, Jocasta Ball, Mark Horrigan, Louise Brown, Ziad Nehme

Atrial fibrillation (AF) is the most common cardiac arrhythmia, accounting for one in 100 ambulance attendances in Victoria, with nearly all patients (99.4%) transported to emergency departments (EDs). Despite this, evidence suggests many low-risk AF patients could be managed in the community. The Safe Treatment of Atrial Fibrillation in the Community (STAY) trial, an Australian-first feasibility study launched in November 2021, aiming to address this gap.

Conducted by Ambulance Victoria in partnership with Safer Care Victoria, Austin Health and Monash University, the trial introduced a community-based model of care that allowed paramedics in metropolitan Melbourne to treat haemodynamically stable (lowrisk) AF patients at home. Using telehealth cardiology consultations, paramedics administer medications such as metoprolol (beta-blocker) and rivaroxaban (anticoagulant) under specialist guidance and refer patients to outpatient cardiology clinics for rapid followup within 24 hours, avoiding unnecessary ED transport.

Of 573 AF patients assessed, 57 low-risk individuals (mean age 70 years, 60% female) were enrolled. Paramedic initial assessments showed a mean heart rate of 119 bpm, and blood pressure was 134/81 mmHg. The median CHA2DS2-VASc score was 3 (IQR: 2-4), primarily driven by age and hypertension, while the median HAS-BLED score was 1 (IQR: 0-1) at the in-hospital cardiology clinic follow-up.

Paramedics safely administered metoprolol (54%) and rivaroxaban (40%) to patients, with no subsequent need to discontinue these medications for bradycardia or bleeding. Virtual care via video-telehealth was provided to 41 patients within one day, while almost all patients (n=55) attended the cardiology outpatient clinic within three days.

Compared to ED referrals, STAY patients received specialist care significantly faster (p<0.001), with outpatient cardiology consultations occurring within days, whereas ED-referred patients often face delays of up to six weeks. At 30 days, there were no deaths, a low hospital admission rate (5%), and high patient safety outcomes.

The STAY Trial exemplifies innovation in clinical practice by leveraging paramedic expertise, telehealth technology, and specialist collaboration to deliver timely and effective care. The trial demonstrated that paramedicled treatment and referral of low-risk AF patients using an integrated model of care is both feasible, safe and effective. These findings will inform the development of a statewide model integrating virtual ED assessments and outpatient cardiology referrals across Victoria.

Excellence in Clinical Practice PRECARE

NSW Ambulance

Team: Natalie Kruit

PRECARE is an innovative feasibility study of pre-hospital extracorporeal life support (ECPR) completed by NSW Ambulance, Sydney Local Health District, Western Sydney Local Health District and St Vincent’s Hospital.

ECPR is a therapy that may offer improved survival for patients who have not responded to standard advanced life support (ALS). However, this treatment is currently only possible for patients who live very close to an ECPR-capable hospital, enabling them to be rapidly conveyed to that centre. This situation represents a significant health equity challenge.

In this study, ambulance physicians and paramedics were trained to undertake extracorporeal membrane oxygenation (ECMO) cannulation in cardiac arrest, and to establish patients on ECMO flow, restoring blood flow to the brain and other organs.

Tasked by a dedicated intensive care paramedic in the control room, early dispatch and carefully designed workflows allowed the team to reach more patients across a wider geographical footprint than can be achieved in current practice. The out-of-hospital cardiac arrest (OHCA) desk provides call-taker support and pre-arrival coordination to facilitate rapid scene management.

This resulted in fast cannulation times relative to the published literature. A survival rate of 25% in the initial cohort is consistent with internal studies and indicates that an ambulance-led system can effectively deliver this therapy.

The study provided additional opportunities to improve understanding of the physiology and effectiveness of therapies in the early stages of resuscitation. This has identified future avenues for research and intervention.

There are additional benefits associated with engaging front-line clinicians with research, advanced care, and education.

Excellence in Clinical Practice Extended Care Paramedics Pilot

St John WA

Team: Gayle Christie, Ade Barron, Patrick O'Dal

The Extended Care Paramedics (ECP) trial at St John WA (SJWA) demonstrates excellence in skills, pharmacology, and clinical intervention by delivering a 72% success rate in managing patients in situ or via an alternative care pathway, including to SJWA Urgent Care, and avoiding Emergency Departments (EDs).

Paramedics are uniquely placed to provide 24/7 care to lower acuity patients in the community with minimal disruption, since many are elderly or from aged care facilities. Increasing the scope of practice and delivering appropriate diversion to alternative care pathways ultimately improves patient outcomes.

Key achievements in the trial include:

• Robust consultation with professional bodies representing nurses and General Practitioners (GPs) early in the process has led to better collaborative outcomes.

• Led, driven, created and implemented by frontline SJWA team members, with the backing of its Medical Director, has been pivotal to its success, not only within the ECP program but in disseminating learnings to the wider paramedic cohort.

• Secondary Triage Team (STT)’s 80% success rate for likely identification of ECP suitable patients, which was integral to the success and efficiency of the model.

• ECP suitable calls transferred to STT, identifying two specific patient cohorts – palliative care patients and catheter patients.

• Early adoption of point-of-care ultrasound for bladder scanning in suspected urinary retention, as well as for US-guided IV access where required.

• Non-trauma back pain cases had a 74% ED avoidance rate as compared to 25% consistently for on-road paramedic crews.

• ECPs' instrumental role in delivering education and training, e.g. implementing the patella reduction training package and Clinical Practice Guideline (CPG), as well as developing and delivering training on falls assessment and referrals during the 2025 paramedic Continuing Education Program (CEP). Notably, Injury Matters WA is advocating for this training package to be put forward for a 2025 Injury Prevention and Safety Promotion award (refer to W).

Throughout the trial, SJWA has built strong collaborative relationships across GPs, hospitals, Palliative Care Services, Allied Health Services, and Geriatricians. Unique to Western Australia (WA), an ECP has been embedded at the newly created State Health Operations Centre (SHOC) to collaborate on identifying patients with 7% of referrals from its WA Virtual Emergency Department (WAVED), 73% through STT (also housed at SHOC) and 11% from direct crew referrals.

Smart ambulance technologies

+ Real-time virtual communication using video -conferencing

+ Rapid entry case notes

+ Integration with patient records

+ AI enabled Clinical Decision Support

+ Medical Device integration

To

Staff Development Excellence in

Recognising education improvement or innovation in the fields of: Programme design, delivery, assessment, and accreditation; professional development, skills maintenance, and practice standards, including community education; and research and/or innovation supporting evidence-based practice. When making their submission to this category, each service is challenged to explore areas where improvements have been made in staff development, and how these resonating changes have improved the evolution of paramedicine.

Sponsored by

Excellence in Staff Development CHOGM

Hato Hone St John

Team: Ryan Eden

In October 2024, Hato Hone St John deployed a large team of paramedics, managers, and support personnel to Apia, Samoa, to support the hosting of the Commonwealth Heads of Government Meeting (CHOGM) 2024. The hosting of the 27th CHOGM meeting was of immense significance to Samoa, the wider South Pacific region and for relationships between Samoa, Australia and New Zealand. The meeting was attended by heads of government from 27 member nations, their delegations and His Royal Highness King Charles.

Both the New Zealand Ministry of Foreign Affairs & Trade (MFAT) and the Samoan Fire & Emergency Services Authority (SFESA) approached Hato Hone St John to develop a partnership approach to providing event health services and emergency medical services to CHOGM attendees and personnel. Hato Hone St John immediately recognised this as a significant undertaking in both scale and complexity, but also a critical opportunity to provide development opportunities to personnel across the wider organisation.

After over six months of planning, Hato Hone St John deployed a large team of 20+ registered paramedics, managers, and support personnel by air to Apia, and a fleet of five ambulances and one rapid response 4x4 vehicle on board the HMNZS Canterbury as part of the ‘New Zealand Inc’ contingent.

During the duration of CHOGM, Hato Hone St John paramedics worked alongside SFESA personnel in ambulances that were staged at major event venues, in motorcades escorting important delegates between venues, in the temporary hospital established for CHOGM participants, and supported community responses where appropriate. Hato Hone St John managers were present for daily NZ High Commission briefings and worked alongside SFESA personnel in the CHOGM Emergency Operations Centre.

This programme had a significant staff development focus, as most within the organisation had not participated in this type of deployment before. Key development opportunities included:

- Utilising a Coordinated Incident Management System (CIMS) structure to form the structure and operations of the project team, including decision-tracking, regular stakeholder sitreps and CIMS roles within the team.

- Preparing our registered paramedics to practice in a new environment with unique and unknown challenges.

- Preparing our registered paramedics to assess forand manage - illnesses they may not be exposed to within New Zealand.

- Preparing our registered paramedics to understand the medicolegal aspects of practising abroad, where medicolegal frameworks between New Zealand (practitioner), Apia (location) and elsewhere (country of origin of the patient) were not consistent or aligned.

Excellence in Staff Development

NSW Ambulance Station Manager

Familiarisation Program

NSW Ambulance

Team: Sheryl Baker

In alignment with the evolving operational, clinical, and financial demands of NSW Ambulance, the reintroduction of 61 Station Manager positions across the state marks a pivotal enhancement in the structural and support systems of each station. This strategic initiative significantly bolsters the governance framework within NSW Ambulance, ensuring that each Station Manager is thoroughly equipped to manage the multifaceted responsibilities inherent in their role.

The Station Manager Familiarisation Program is meticulously designed to build upon the foundational skills of these leaders, focusing particularly on fostering confidence and safety during single-responder scenarios, which are often the most challenging aspects of their duties. The program aims to fortify their capabilities in navigating complex operational and clinical environments, thereby enhancing their effectiveness in supervisory roles.

Station Managers are provided with intensive training that spans across clinical governance, operational acumen, and robust leadership practices. The curriculum is enriched with practical simulations that mirror real-life emergencies, offering Station Managers hands-on experience in strategic response and incident management. This immersive approach ensures that they gain a comprehensive understanding of the nuances of station management and are prepared to lead their teams with confidence.

Furthermore, the program emphasises the importance of safety, not only for the Station Managers but also for the clinicians and clinical volunteers under their supervision. By instilling best practices in safety management and response protocols, the program ensures that they are adept at safeguarding their teams and enhancing the overall safety standards of NSW Ambulance.

This strategic enhancement of these roles through the Familiarisation Program underscores NSW Ambulance’s commitment to upholding the highest standards of governance and accountability. It ensures that Station Managers are not just managers but also leaders who inspire confidence and safety in their teams, contributing significantly to the operational efficiency and integrity of the service.

Excellence in Staff Development LGBTIQ+ Inclusive Practice Learning Modules

NSW Ambulance

Team: Stephanie Looi

This project sought to build an online education package for NSW Ambulance staff to improve their confidence in inclusive and respectful interactions with the Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgender, Intersex, and Queer (LGBTIQ+) community, with a particular focus on mental health and suicide risk assessment. Funded through the NSW Health LGBTIQ+ funding stream, the project was delivered in partnership with ACON, a health organisation specialising in community health, inclusion, and HIV responses for people of diverse sexualities and genders (LGBTQ+ people).

Through ACON’s strong links to the community and its lived experience mental health group, members of the LGBTIQ+ community in NSW were invited to share their experiences in accessing ambulance services. This ensured that the consumer voice was heard strongly throughout the modules. The value of real, livedexperience perspectives cannot be understated when creating training that promotes inclusion. While statistics and research help learners understand these issues from a population-level perspective, it is personal stories that foster understanding and empathy, especially for those who are not part of these communities themselves. This is particularly relevant for ambulance clinicians, who often have short yet vital interactions with consumers without the opportunity to follow up.

The modules were released as optional (non-mandatory) training through the NSW Ambulance online platform for clinical education. In the three months following their release, 3,662 clinicians—over half of the clinical workforce—had commenced the training, with more than 3,000 completing all three optional modules. Evaluation following completion of the modules demonstrated their effectiveness in improving the knowledge, skills, and attitudes of paramedics. Of the more than 1,700 post-course surveys completed, 78% of participants agreed or strongly agreed that their understanding and confidence in assessing the mental health needs of LGBTQI+ communities had increased. Additionally, 87% reported feeling confident in applying the learnings in their role, and 83% said they would recommend the training to their colleagues.

The strong uptake of this non-mandatory training and the positive evaluation results indicate a strong desire for learning in this space, with potential applicability across all ambulance services.

Excellence in Staff Development Women in Leadership Development Plan

NSW Ambulance

Team: Mary Wayumba

The NSW Ambulance (NSWA) Women in Leadership (WIL) Development Plan 2022-2024 was created to address the ongoing gender disparity in operational leadership. While NSWA achieved gender parity for the first time in 2022, this balance was not reflected in operational leadership roles. With the NSWA Vision and Strategic Plan 2021–2026 including priorities for an engaged, safe, and professional workforce, alongside the NSW Premier’s commitment to achieving 50% female representation in senior leadership roles by 2025, the need to build a strong female leadership pipeline became clear.

Additionally, a 40% workforce increase over the coming years highlighted the critical need to develop and support future women leaders. The WIL Development Plan was designed to address key barriers that prevent women from stepping into and thriving in leadership roles.

A literature review identified three core challenges:

• Connections – A need for better networks, mentors, and sponsors

• Confidence – overcoming negative self-perception, different life stages, and the ”double bind” effect.

• Capabilities – improving access to skills development required for career progression, impacting confidence and readiness.

To address these challenges, the WIL Development Plan delivered a range of tailored leadership development and support experiences, ensuring accessibility for both metropolitan and regional staff across diverse rosters and learning preferences. These initiatives included:

• Reading groups

• Virtual blended learning programs

• Discussion forums

• In-person and virtual summits and workshops

The response was overwhelming, with 138 applications and 95 participants engaging in eleven different development opportunities over two years. Recognising women in leadership challenges extend beyond a single agency, the Emergency Women in Leadership Steering Committee was established, driven by NSWA. This cross-agency initiative brought together representatives from all NSW emergency services to address shared women in leadership development needs.

The WIL Development Plan has had a tangible impact:

• 100% of surveyed participants said they would recommend the program.

• 86% took on new projects or responsibilities as a direct result of their involvement

• 57% applied for or were promoted into leadership roles

This initiative has paved the way for greater gender equity in leadership, empowering women within NSW Ambulance to step into leadership with confidence and capability. Over the two years, there has been an increase in women in senior operational leadership roles, with the WIL Development Plan playing a role among other contributing factors.

Excellence in Staff Development NSWA Mandatory Clinical Professional Development

NSW Ambulance

Team: Mike Richer

The Mandatory Clinical Professional Development (MCPD) Program is a transformative initiative designed to elevate the capabilities of our operational workforce through consistent and structured education and training. This innovative program fosters a culture of continuous learning, ensuring that clinicians have regular opportunities to refine their skills and stay abreast of clinical and organisational advancements. MCPD offers a dynamic two-day training structure, significantly increasing the frequency and depth of educational interactions compared to the previous program, where operational staff attended Maintenance Training for three days every 18 months.

The new MCPD framework enhances this model by facilitating a more consistent and immersive educational experience, driving greater investment in clinical capability and professional growth. By integrating more frequent training opportunities, clinicians experience accelerated exposure to clinical and industry changes, fostering a more adaptive and responsive workforce. The MCPD initiative ensures that operational teams are more regularly involved in education and development, reinforcing best practices and enhancing overall engagement with professional education.

A key component of the MCPD Program is its structured approach to maintaining a high level of involvement for operational staff. The increased regularity of training sessions promotes a deeper commitment to clinical excellence, allowing clinicians to continuously refine their skills in alignment with evolving industry standards. This enhanced model ensures that learning is not only more frequent but also more impactful, ultimately improving patient care outcomes and operational efficiency. Furthermore, the MCPD initiative works closely with Clinical Operations to develop bestpractice rostering strategies that optimise participation while minimising disruptions to service delivery. By incorporating a collaborative approach to scheduling, the program has maximised accessibility and ensured clinicians can fully engage in their professional development without compromising operational demands. Many MCPD sessions are delivered from a state-of-the-art education facility at the newly established State Operations Centre. This cutting-edge learning environment is designed to provide clinicians with access to the latest educational tools and resources, fostering an immersive and high-quality training experience.

The MCPD Program is a forward-thinking educational model designed to elevate capabilities, drive engagement and create a workforce that is adept at responding to the ever-changing healthcare landscape. Through more frequent training, structured development opportunities, and strategic rostering, MCPD ensures that clinicians remain at the forefront of best practices, delivering high-quality care to the community. This initiative is a commitment to professional excellence and continuous improvement, empowering our operational workforce to thrive in an evolving clinical environment.

Excellence in Staff Development Quality Improvement Program (QI)

SA Ambulance Service

Team: Amy Keir, Michelle Thomson

The SA Ambulance Service (SAAS) Quality Improvement (QI) Program is providing meaningful differences through improving safety, effectiveness, and healthcare experience through understanding our environment, applying a systematic approach, and designing, testing, and implementing changes using real-time measurements.

At SAAS, we are implementing this organisationalwide QI program using the Evidence-based Practice for Improving Quality (EPIQ) program, which includes PlanDo-Study-Act (PDSA) cycles. This has been made possible with strong organisational support, including the entire Senior Leadership Team attending training workshops.

The EPIQ program, developed from a 2002-2005 study in Canadian neonatal intensive care units, is:

• EVIDENCE-BASED – grounded in research and site data.

• TARGETED – focuses on variations in outcomes.

• COLLABORATIVE – engages a network of clinicians and experts.

• CONTINUOUS – promotes an ongoing culture of improvement.

QUALITY IMPROVEMENT (QI) empowers those closest to care challenges with the time, skills, and resources to drive meaningful change. It follows a systematic approach using specific methods and tools to achieve measurable improvements, fostering a culture of excellence, efficiency, and continuous learning. Clinician-led QI initiatives often yield more impactful care improvements than large-scale managerial changes or external reviews. The structured approach used by EPIQ empowers healthcare providers as change agents, with local champions quickly gaining confidence to lead team-based QI efforts.

The SAAS QI program has made strong progress since its start in September 2023, delivering eight workshops, engaging over 100 participants and identifying nine champions. While enthusiasm remains high, embedding QI into daily practice requires a deeper understanding of barriers and enablers. An implementation plan, informed by the COM-B model for behaviour change and the CFIR-ERIC framework for overcoming adoption challenges, has been developed to translate enthusiasm into actionable projects.

The focus now is on embedding QI into business as usual through:

• Managing the QI project and resource register.

• Implementing strategies from the QI EPIQ Implementation Plan for a sustainable approach.

• Advancing a key QI project to improve the Clinical Practice Guideline (CPG) process within SAAS.

We are seeing QI used as the ‘go-to’ methodology for solving complex clinical challenges at SAAS.

Excellence in Staff Development Transforming Emergency Management Training

SA Ambulance Service

Team: Janette Stephens, Michael Borrowdale, Douglas Dippy, Kevin Malpas

After a COVID-induced hiatus in incident management training, SAAS turned a crisis into an opportunity to overhaul its incident management training and systems.

Creative approaches were used to make the training engaging and also to facilitate an accelerated deployment of incident management training to over two-thirds of operational staff during 2024.

For example, the Incident in a Box made it easy for teams across SA to conduct training exercisesan innovation that has now been adopted by interstate ambulance services.

Contemporary approaches to online training design also facilitated the rapid rollout by making it easy for staff to complete the pre-learning in their own time, with modules made more engaging and accessible through micro-learning concepts, reality-based learning and online functionality.

An inclusive approach saw more non-clinical staff receive this training, which proved its worth shortly after a large number of Emergency Operations Centre staff completed the training and were faced with a hospital fire. The EOC team quickly identified its potential, declared an incident and put appropriate measures in place in case a scaled-up response was required.

The program has been driven by the SAAS Emergency Management and Planning Team, but collaboration was also key to its success, and SAAS’s clinical educators played a key role in delivering this training through the professional development workshop stream during 2024.

Wide-scale training is continuing in 2025 with a focus on volunteer clinicians and paramedic interns, including three major mass casualty exercises in regional SA for volunteers and similar exercises for the interns.

This initiative has involved a complete overhaul of the training curriculum with all materials rewritten from scratch, which added to the size of the challenge but also created an opportunity to make the training more relevant to the modern threat environment.

In parallel with the training focus, key incident management tools and systems were upgraded as part of this project.

The result of this challenging project is that SAAS has significantly strengthened its incident management capability through its commitment to transform incident management training and systems.

Excellence in Staff Development Enhancing Resuscitation Quality Through Data-driven Feedback

Ambulance Victoria

Team: Ziad Nehme, Belinda Delardes, Tara Ralph, Brett Whibley, Jenna Schwarz, Melanie Villani, Danny Pham, Kimberley Magain, Ashanti Dantanarayana

Clinical feedback and debriefing in healthcare is often perceived as punitive or disciplinary and can be confronting, particularly when they involve highstakes situations, such as out-of-hospital cardiac arrests (OHCA). The International Liaison Committee on Resuscitation (ILCOR) and the Global Resuscitation Alliance (GRA) advocate for data-driven, performancefocused debriefing after OHCA, a practice proven to significantly improve patient outcomes. Despite these benefits, feedback and debriefing remain underutilised skills in ambulance services and can prove challenging for paramedics, educators, and managers.

In July 2020, Ambulance Victoria established routine post-resuscitation feedback reports supported by the collection of cardiopulmonary resuscitation (CPR) quality data and improved functionality embedded into the Victorian Ambulance Cardiac Arrest Registry (VACAR). These reports, known as Team Performance Reports, are based on 19 evidence-based metrics which align with current guidelines and include initial rhythm recognition, quality of CPR, timeliness of interventions and quality of post-resuscitation care. The report utilises a ‘traffic light’ system that benchmarks each attempted resuscitation against the previous twelve-month results.

Every month, over 150 Team Performance Reports are generated and sent to paramedics and their team managers. Between July 2020 and December 2024, 9,111 Team Performance Reports have been distributed, driving measurable long-term improvements in resuscitation quality, including:

• The time to defibrillation pad placement reduced from 1.4 to 1.2 minutes (p<0.001).

• The proportion of cases where chest compressions were performed during pad placement increased from 83% to 99% (p<0.001).

• Chest compression fraction increased from 79% to 92% (p<0.001).

• The proportion of chest compressions in the target range increased from 65% to 68% (p=0.04).

• The proportion of cases achieving their first defibrillation within 2 minutes increased from 53% to 72% (p<0.001).

• The mean pre-shock pause reduced from 8.0 to 6.4 seconds (p<0.001).

• The mean post-shock pause reduced from 6.2 to 3.6 seconds (p<0.001).

• The mean time to adrenaline administration reduced from 8.2 to 6.6 minutes (p<0.001).

• The mean time to laryngeal mask airway insertion reduced from 3.7 to 2.9 minutes (p<0.001).

The implementation of Team Performance Reports at Ambulance Victoria is a groundbreaking example of how evidence-based, data-driven feedback enhances resuscitation quality, strengthens clinical performance, and fosters continuous professional development in paramedic practice. The initiative now represents an easily transferable model of clinical feedback that can be implemented into ambulance services internationally and is likely to serve as an exemplar or other patient populations.

Excellence in Staff Development Ambulance Response to Active Armed Offender: SOP and CCE

Hato Hone St John

Team: Chris Harrison, Emma Sutherland

Following our Tactical Commander training for all ambulance operations managers across Aotearoa New Zealand, Hato Hone St John designed, developed and implemented training for all ambulance operations personnel on our new Ambulance response to an active armed offender standard operating procedure (SOP).

This SOP provides direction to all functional roles across Ambulance Operations, including task cards, to reduce risk associated with a lack of direction in responding to complex, serious incidents that pose a high level of risk to responding personnel, patients and bystanders.

Training for all emergency ambulance service personnel, including managers and major incident support personnel, was developed in-house by our Clinical Education Development Team. Online modules, podcasts and a chronological education video were developed by our Learning Media team. This info-motion-graphic animated video demonstrates the entire sequence of an AAO event, from 111 call to handover of the last patient at the hospital, zooming in on every key role and highlighting that if everyone does their role exceptionally well, lives will be saved.

These learning tools are accessible for all personnel on our intranet system, to ensure that they remain refreshed on this topic easily.

We utilised our Continuing Clinical Education (CCE) training medium to deliver the face-to-face component. Clinical Support Officers (CSOs) delivered 8-hour sessions nationwide to over 3,700 personnel.

These sessions covered:

• familiarisation of the SOP;

• major incident management principles;

• dynamic risk assessment;

• the CARE mnemonic (check for weapons, active haemorrhage control, rapid triage, extricate);

• haemorrhage control techniques;

• stab and ballistic resistant (SABR) vest sizing; and donning; and

• practical scenarios tying all the above together.

Course feedback and evaluation were gathered via an online survey, accessed by learners via a QR code. A high level of feedback was provided, with the most positive score for CCE training to date for HHSJ.

Excellence in Staff Development

Deliver Sector-Recognised Family

and Domestic Violence Informed Education to Emergency Responders Across All of WA

St John WA

Team: Alex French, Senaida D'Souza, Carole Donaldson, Colleen West, Kate Jeffries

St John WA (SJWA), in collaboration with Stopping Family Violence (SFV) and The Centre for Social Impact at the University of Western Australia (CSI UWA), has pioneered a Family and Domestic Violence (FDV) education project aimed at ambulance emergency responders. This innovative initiative marks the first time structured, targeted FDV education has been integrated into the training of emergency responders, including regional volunteers. It is SJWA’s largest ever regional roll-out of educational content and addresses a critical gap in existing education across the entire Australasian ambulance sector.

Historically, FDV education has not been included within the tertiary paramedicine curriculum, nor has it been offered by any of the Council of Ambulance Authorities (CAA) member organisations across Australia, New Zealand and Papua New Guinea. While some jurisdictions have provided voluntary access to online modules, such as those offered by White Ribbon Australia, these have not been comprehensive or specific to the needs of emergency responders in an operational setting. SJWA’s unique education package equips emergency response team members with essential skills and knowledge to effectively recognise and respond to potential FDV situations.

The education package includes three key components:

1. Identifying and Responding to FDV in a Health Setting: Helping emergency responders to understand the various forms of FDV, recognise signs, and equip them with tools to appropriately respond, ensuring both patients and responders feel supported.

2. Screening and Risk Assessment: How to assess risk factors related to FDV and take appropriate actions to protect the patient and themselves in high-risk scenarios.

3. Collecting and Transferring Relevant Information to Health Service Providers: Importance of accurate and timely documentation and communication of FDV-related information to HSPs, usually through Emergency Departments (EDs), for continued care and support.

Aligned with WA Health’s Path to Safety: Strategy to reduce FDV 2020-2030 (Refer to FDV Strategy), the project integrates these educational components with existing tools, training programs and policies aimed at enhancing the response to FDV across the healthcare sector. The collaboration between SJWA, SFV and CSI UWA ensured the project was based on best practice and has been continuously evaluated for effectiveness, ultimately improving the quality of care provided to patients experiencing FDV in WA.

This initiative represents a significant step forward in addressing FDV in emergency health settings and supports the broader goal of improving outcomes for victim-survivors through enhanced education and awareness within the ambulance sector.

Behind every emergency response is a uniform built for action.

At Workwear Group Uniforms, we don’t just make uniforms—we engineer purpose-driven apparel that supports the brave individuals who serve on the front lines of Australia’s emergency services.

As part of the Workwear Group, we proudly supply tailored uniform solutions to ambulance services across Victoria, Tasmania, South Australia, Western Australia, the Northern Territory, and the ACT. Our legacy brands—Hard Yakka, KingGee, and NNT—are trusted names in durability and performance.

We collaborate closely with emergency service agencies including ambulance, fire, police, defence, and corrections to ensure every garment meets the demands of the job. Our uniforms are more than fabric—they’re tools of the trade, designed to empower those who protect and care for our communities.

We’re committed to evolving with your needs.

Through strong partnerships and continuous innovation, Workwear Group Uniforms ensures your teams are equipped for today—and ready for tomorrow.

Patient Care Excellence in

Recognising patient experience, improvement, or innovation. When making their submission to this category, each service is emboldened to examine ways that their organisation has assisted specific patient cohorts where learnings were of benefit to the field of paramedicine.

Sponsored by

Excellence in Patient Care Raizer II Lifter Program

Ambulance Tasmania

Team: Dr Angela Martin

This innovative program aims to enhance the efficiency and effectiveness of community paramedics by providing them with specialised equipment to assist patients who have fallen.

The Raizer II Lifter is a portable, lightweight device designed to lift a fallen person to an almost standing position within minutes. This device can be assembled underneath the patient, ensuring a secure fit and reducing the physical strain on paramedics.

One of the primary benefits of the Raizer II Lifter program is its potential to reduce the need for a two-person emergency crew to attend to non-critical fall incidents. Traditionally, lifting a fallen patient requires significant manpower, often necessitating the dispatch of a two-person crew. With the Raizer II Lifter, a single community paramedic can effectively manage the situation, freeing up additional resources for more critical emergencies. This not only optimises the use of paramedic teams but also reduces response times for other urgent calls.

Moreover, the timely response facilitated by the Raizer II Lifter program significantly reduces the time patients spend on the ground after a fall. Prolonged periods on the ground can lead to complications such as pressure sores, dehydration, and increased anxiety for the patient. By enabling a quicker and more efficient response by community paramedics, the Raizer II Lifter helps mitigate these risks, improving patient outcomes and overall satisfaction.

With 80 per cent of community paramedics now trained in the Raizer II lifter in Tasmania, timely and effective care can now be provided, particularly in rural and remote areas where resources may be limited. This aligns with the broader goals of community paramedicine, which seeks to extend the role of paramedics to include primary and preventive care services.

The creation of an Operational Work Instruction for the communications centre guides dispatchers to consider deploying community paramedics equipped with the Raizer II Lifter device as a strategy for handling low to moderate acuity community falls.

In summary, the development of the Raizer II Lifter program at Ambulance Tasmania represents a significant advancement in community paramedicine in Tasmania. By empowering paramedics to respond more efficiently to falls, the program enhances patient care, optimises resource utilisation, and supports the broader goals of community-based healthcare.

Excellence in Patient Care VCCC Interhospital Transfer Surveillance

NSW Ambulance

Team: Hayley Turner

The New South Wales Ambulance (NSWA) Virtual Clinical Care Centre (VCCC) Interhospital Transfer Surveillance process represents a transformative approach to managing interfacility patient transfers with a clinical focus to optimise patient safety. Designed to address inefficiencies in patient triaging and provision of clinical information, and reduce risks associated with inappropriate transfer prioritisation, this initiative ensures that patients receive the right care at the right time, even amidst high demand periods.

Historically, interhospital transfers were triaged based on the booking facility’s requested timeframe, often determined by administrative staff rather than clinicians. This led to inconsistent prioritisation - some critical patients faced unnecessary delays, while nonurgent cases could consume vital ambulance resources.

Recognising the potential for adverse outcomes and system inefficiencies, NSWA introduced a dedicated clinical oversight model to maintain patient safety and support dispatch decision-making. At the core of this project are the NSWA VCCC Senior Clinicians—Clinical Nurse Consultants and Paramedic Specialists—who review interhospital transfer requests, applying a clinical lens to determine appropriate response timeframes. This ensures that each transfer is assessed based on medical necessity rather than administrative preference, improving patient safety and optimising ambulance resource allocation and availability.

A key component of the initiative was the modification of the F9 protocol, requiring essential clinical details, including diagnosis, required intervention, timing, and observations, to be provided at the time of booking. When information is insufficient, VCCC Senior Clinicians proactively engage with referring facilities to clarify patient needs and reassess transfer urgency. By implementing this structured approach, NSWA achieved significant improvements in triage accuracy, reducing delays for critical interventions while alleviating unnecessary strain on Control Centre Dispatchers and NSWA paramedics.

The initiative has also driven cultural change among referring institutions, fostering a greater understanding of how booking decisions impact broader ambulance resource availability and ultimately patient safety. With a robust data capture and evaluation framework, the project identified patterns of over- and undertriaging, allowing targeted education and continuous improvement strategies. The success of this model presents an opportunity for replication across other ambulance services, ensuring enhanced patient outcomes and more effective resource management on a larger scale.

The NSWA VCCC Interhospital Transfer Surveillance Project is an exemplary demonstration of how clinical leadership and informed decision-making can revolutionise patient care pathways within ambulance services, setting a new benchmark for operational excellence in interfacility transfers.

Excellence in Patient Care QAS Inter-Facility Transfer Priority

Queensland Ambulance Service

Team: Dan Bodnar, Rebeca Costello

Inter-Facility Transports (IFTs) are a core component of the service model of the Queensland Ambulance Service (QAS) and comprise approximately 10% of QAS workload. Optimisation of the IFT process is necessary to ensure safe patient outcomes and augmentation of patient flow through the broader health system.

Patients requiring IFTs are different to the community cohort in that they have already been assessed by a health professional. This means that their treatment trajectory is known, their illness severity is known, and their final disposition is known. These factors allow the streaming of these patients to dedicated ambulance resources and the ability to smooth the demand for dispatch for this cohort.

Utilising the skill set of the QAS Clinical Hub Senior Medical Clinical Consultants (SMCC), the QAS piloted a project in the Sunshine Coast District, which overlays the Sunshine Coast Hospital and Health Services (SCHHS), to optimise the current IFT process.

The Sunshine Coast District IFT pilot involved three primary initiatives:

• Review of IFT requests by a SMCC

• Re-triaging of IFT requests and negotiating with the SCHHS to ensure that transfer occurred within clinically appropriate timeframes, and

• The quarantining of IFT dedicated resources for IFTs.

The pilot was conducted for 12 weeks, commencing in May 2024. No additional resourcing was provided to the Clinical Hub or the Sunshine Coast District before the pilot. The evaluation of the pilot focused on patient safety, workforce wellbeing and operational efficiency.

During the pilot, a total of 323 incidents were reviewed and re-triaged by SMCC in the Clinical Hub. These re-coordinated IFT requests resulted in a 23.6% reduction in Code1B and Code 2A responses. The SMCCs review also identified 3.1% of incidents that required upgrading to a Code 1 response, with approximately 20% of final Code 1B and Code 2A dispatches resulting from SMCC up-triaging.

The IFT resources' meal overtime hours improved by 12%, and staff working on the IFT resource had a 19% reduction in shift extensions.

Dedicated IFT resources were successfully quarantined from acute work, resulting in a 133% increase in IFT resources being utilised for IFT incidents. There was a 17% decrease in acute resources responding to IFTs, thereby freeing up acute resources for community responses.

Since the Sunshine Coast District IFT pilot, the QAS has conducted a pilot in Cairns, evaluating the rural setting, and a stepwise roll-out across the state commenced in March 2025.

Excellence in Patient Care Clinical Risk Stratification Procedure & Dashboard

SA Ambulance Service

Team: Angelik van den Berg, Elisabeth Charles, Anne-Marie Fisher, Keith Driscoll

In a time where the demand on the health care system is overwhelmingly high, SA Ambulance Service (SAAS) has taken a transformative step to enhance clinical oversight, reduce delays and improve patient safety by developing a Clinical Risk Stratification Procedure and Dashboard. The dashboard was developed alongside the procedure to provide a clinical framework within the Emergency Operations Centre (EOC) for patients with delays in ambulance response time.

The Clinical Risk Stratification Dashboard was implemented to assist the Clinicians in:

1. Identifying those patients with delays;

2. Communicating amongst the clinicians which patients still required or had already received a clinical review;

3. Highlighting those patients who were significantly delayed;

4. Highlighting those patients that were so significantly delayed, another clinical review or comprehensive clinical assessment was now required; and

5. Identifying patients that were flagged for a clinical review as a priority, with the flags able to be generated from EMDSO and other clinicians who may be busy dealing with another matter at the time.

This revolutionary dashboard has assisted in communication between different workgroups that are geographically spread. It has assisted in the distribution of workload across the two clinical workgroups and improved the shared responsibility in provisioning clinical reviews and comprehensive clinical assessments across all our patients with a delayed response.

Excellence in Patient Care

Ambulance Tasmania Palliative Care Project (Enhancing Paramedic Palliative Care Initiative)

Ambulance Tasmania

Team: Emma Foreman-Lake, Kim Hymas, Lauren Burford, Mike McDermott, Hamish Crisp, Laura Butler, Tim Schmidtke

The Ambulance Tasmania (AT) Palliative Care project, a grant-funded initiative that commenced in 2024, aims to transform the delivery of unplanned out-of-hospital palliative care in Tasmania.

The initiative focuses on three main objectives: establishing mechanisms to collect quantitative palliative care data; enhancing the current clinical care provision system to align with community needs; and building lasting skills and capabilities within the organisation to drive future innovations in paramedic palliative care. This initiative promotes a person-centred approach to palliative and end-of-life patient care, underpinned by service-wide education at all operational levels, aligning with the four pillars of AT’s strategic priorities: Our Future 2024-2028 – ‘our patients, our people, our performance, and our partnerships’.

Key achievements include securing external grant funding, extensive consultation and community networking, recruitment of Clinical Nurse Educators with subject matter expertise, and changes to the electronic Patient Care Record (ePCR) for improved data collection and reporting. The project has also developed new policies, procedures, and clinical practice guidelines, implemented a palliative care medication calculator, and enhanced the Secondary Triage team's education and referral pathways.

Educational packages for Volunteer First Responders, Paramedics, and Community Paramedics have been created, along with surveys to assess education and identify areas for improvement. Palliative care champions have been identified and sponsored for further education.

The project's effectiveness is evaluated through various metrics, including new data collection methods, safety event monitoring, consumer feedback, and staff education uptake. Surveys indicate improvements in workforce palliative care knowledge and management comfort, with positive care experiences reported by palliative care consumers.

This initiative sets a benchmark for future innovation in palliative care, emphasising meaningful data collection, workforce engagement in quality improvement initiatives, and consumer and stakeholder feedback. It provides a comprehensive approach to how Ambulance Tasmania defines, identifies, understands, and treats palliative care patients, aligning with the organisation's strategic plan and community needs.

Excellence in Patient Care Paramedics Exposure Analysis (PEA)

Ambulance Victoria

Team: Rachel Atkinson, Farhad Salimi, Kate Cantwell

“ You can’t find a fever if you don’t take a temperature”, House of God - Samuel Shem

The Paramedics Exposure Analysis (PEA) project at Ambulance Victoria is a pioneering initiative aimed at enhancing the proficiency and effectiveness of paramedics by analysing their exposure to highacuity cases. This project enables intuitive, rapid, and reproducible analysis of paramedics' exposure to critical cases, such as cardiac arrest, which are closely correlated with patient outcomes.

Paramedics do a difficult job under challenging circumstances. It is never known what the next case might be: an elderly person who has fallen and needs help standing up, or a younger person having a lifethreatening asthma attack. Low exposure and experience are known risk factors for optimal patient outcomes.

To ensure that every patient receives the best care possible, paramedics must be proficient in a range of case types and skills. Over time, paramedics who treat a large volume of cases with diverse clinical presentations and patient demographics, both high and low acuity, can accumulate knowledge and hone their clinical skills. This allows them to manage more complex or high-risk cases effectively. Research shows that for a paramedic to maintain baseline proficiency in various assessments and skills, they need to practise at least three times a year.

Quantifying paramedic staff experience and exposure to high acuity case types and skills allows mitigating strategies to be implemented and clinical risk of poor patient outcomes to be managed.

The PEA shows the high acuity skills and case types, and the percentage of staff from that area exposed to that case type. This is vital information for many reasons:

• Skills maintenance and ongoing education of current staff

• Training for prospective staff entering the area

• Specialised training needs for certain case types in specific areas

• Health and wellbeing of staff due to experience and exposure to particular case types

One of the key components of the PEA project is the implementation of the PEA monitor as a mandatory clinical improvement tool at Ambulance Victoria. This monitor tracks and records paramedics' exposure to high-acuity cases, allowing for continuous assessment and improvement of their clinical skills. The data collected through the PEA monitor is used to identify areas where additional training or support may be needed, ensuring that paramedics are well-prepared to handle critical situations.

Excellence in Patient Care Patient Transport Service

SA Ambulance Service

Team: David Weber-Moll, Paul Lemmer, Aaron Baker, Lisa Stevenson, Leigh Nicolson, Vicki Jokic, Shaun Whales, Pat Stevenson, Clare Toms, Bryan Ward, Antonio Meli, Tom Pulford

SAAS’ Patient Transport Service (PTS) Efficiency

Improvement Project significantly improved timeliness and customer service for elective patient transports

The project commenced as a result of feedback from a ministerial working group focused on transfer of care (TOC) or “ramping” delays. SA Ambulance Service (SAAS) undertook activity with the Department of Health, Local Health Networks (LHNs) and the Ambulance Employees Association (AEA) to review improvement strategies for patient flow across the health system. It was hypothesised that improvements in PTS efficiency would lead to improved patient experience, improved hospital flow and therefore a reduction in TOC, providing further system and patient benefits by increasing emergency ambulance resource availability.

The primary intent of the project was to improve our PTS performance through understanding efficiency barriers that exist across internal and external areas of patient flow in hospitals. As part of the project, we reviewed workload data and roster models, along with staff feedback and LHN engagement to help inform the intended changes for the trial.

We also streamlined SAAS’ internal processes for booking, scheduling and deployment. Examples of work conducted in this space are changes to the Electronic Booking System (EBS) to improve visibility and booking lead time, integration of the changes with LHNs, as well as MDT and phone-ahead procedure enhancements.

During the trial period, we also introduced a new 10.5-hour crewing model into PTS, which provided 24/7 coverage with a compressed rotating shift model that produces significantly improved fatigue scores compared to traditional 12/12 or 10/14 models. Existing roster profiles were also adjusted to ensure we can match the modelled workload demands.

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Leadership Excellence in

Recognising management practise and operational improvement and innovation in: Management culture, open communication, accountability, management development, professional standards, and diversity of workforce, and operational protocols and work practices relative to how service delivery is provided.

When making their submission to this category, each service is encouraged to analyse the programmes they have implemented that paves the way in leadership for future generations.

Sponsored by

Excellence in Leadership Your Say - Ambulance Tasmania's New Employee & Volunteer Engagement Survey

Ambulance Tasmania

Team:

Jane Sweeney, Laura Smith, Mike Campbell, Matt Green

Your Say is Ambulance Tasmania’s new employee and volunteer engagement survey. In 2024, for the first time, Ambulance Tasmania partnered with Culture Amp for this new survey. Culture Amp is a leader in employee engagement surveys with customisable survey questions, strong analytics and user-friendly manager dashboards.

Ambulance Tasmania have been on a journey since mid-2021 to improve the culture across its workplaces. In 2021, Ambulance Tasmania first surveyed its workforce about their experience working or volunteering in the service using a resilience scan. The results of that scan informed the development of the Culture Improvement Action Plan (the Action Plan). The Action Plan contains 73 action items. At the time of writing, 78% of those action items are complete, and the remainder are in progress and due for delivery in 2025.

Feedback from our people strongly indicated a move away from previous survey platforms and to one that was more user-friendly, accessible on any device and provided more opportunity to make comments about a broader range of topics.

The first Your Say survey was held in August-September 2024. 54% of employees responded to the survey, so too did a further 27% of our volunteers, providing an overall participation score of 44%, which was higher than any survey in previous years. The second Your Say survey will be held later in 2025.

Excellence in Leadership Control Centre Reform Communications Team Leader Project

NSW Ambulance

Team: Edwin Lowe, Haley Mestroni

The NSW Ambulance Control Centre Reform Communications Team Leader project has delivered the project goal of establishing permanent Communications Team Leaders as a frontline supervisory and leadership role in two of its regional control centres, as well as expanding the role at its largest metropolitan control centre. This outcome will provide a higher quality of leadership and support to NSW Ambulance Emergency Medical Call Takers and their response to Triple Zero (000) emergency calls, as well as improving the quality of pre-hospital patient care in NSW. This specialist frontline leadership role will also help to improve the wellbeing and morale of our control centre staff, as well as providing a structured pathway of career progression for the Emergency Medical Call Taker workforce.

The expansion of the permanent Communications Team Leader workforce is the cumulative response to increased Triple Zero (000) call volumes and workloads that began with the COVID-19 pandemic, as well as the enhancement of the NSW Ambulance workforce as a result of the NSW Government’s investment in $2 billion funding over seven years, announced in 2022-2023.

The Communications Team Leader project identified and assessed a gap in the span of control in control centres without Communications Team Leaders and reassessed the effectiveness of the role after its temporary expansion in regional control centres as a result of the NSW Ambulance COVID-19 pandemic response.

With the participation and consultation of Communications Team Leader staff in a project working group, the project worked to establish a suitable number of permanent staff across three control centres, establish a system of training and governance for the role, and create optimised fit-for-purpose rosters following consultation with staff and unions.

Excellence in Leadership Southern Control Centre - Adherence Project

NSW Ambulance

Team: Sarah Black

This project was initiated to enhance the interpretation and application of Workforce Management (WFM) statistics to improve Grade of Service (GOS) and overall operational efficiency within the Southern Control Centre. Recognising that the correlation data plays in performance and GOS, the project aimed to reinstate access to key WFM statistics for Communication Team Leaders (CTLs) and develop strategies for their effective utilisation. By leveraging these insights, the team has been able to monitor adherence to break schedules, minimise unnecessary withdrawal times, and promote fairness in workload distribution.

One of the key challenges addressed was the perception of inequity among team members, where highly compliant staff felt they were carrying an extra burden due to lower adherence rates among others. By implementing structured monitoring processes and transparent reporting, this initiative has fostered a culture of accountability and engagement, improving both morale and productivity.

The project also established a sustainable framework for continued performance evaluation. Daily adherence monitoring, coupled with individualised monthly reporting and feedback sessions, ensures that deviations are promptly addressed. This proactive approach supports continuous improvement and enhances service reliability.

The success of this initiative presents an opportunity for scalability across NSW Ambulance Control Centres. By standardising best practices in data utilisation, adherence monitoring, and staff engagement, this model can be adapted to other Control Centres. Its implementation locally has improved workforce efficiency, optimised resource allocation, and ultimately enhanced patient outcomes through more effective emergency response coordination.

This project exemplifies how data-driven decisionmaking can transform operations, fostering a high-performance culture that benefits both staff, the business unit and the communities they serve.

Excellence in Leadership VCCC Support to Major Incidents and Extreme Weather Events

NSW Ambulance

Team: Jaime Warhurst

The NSW Ambulance Virtual Clinical Care Centre (VCCC) has introduced systems and processes to enhance support for major incidents while ensuring efficient, timely, and clinically appropriate patient care. These enhancements address challenges posed by severe weather conditions, extreme resource depletion, and inaccessible patients experiencing delays in care.

These systems and processes include:

• Remote monitoring for inaccessible patients: The VCCC actively monitors low-acuity patients who may face ambulance response delays due to access issues. The VCCC aims to provide self-care advice, virtual assessments, and updates to Control Centres (CC) and the patient to assist in the coordination of resources.

• Improved stakeholder communication and coordination: The VCCC collaborates with CCs and the Aeromedical Control Centre (ACC) to support the streamlining of operations and optimisation of patient care coordination with rescue agencies.

• Surge capacity workforce strategies: workforce surge plans include additional shifts, redeployment of trained staff, and expressions of interest for corporate personnel to support callback functions.

• Advanced clinical support and secondary triage: clinicians conduct secondary triage and follow-up calls to ensure accurate response categories are assigned, divert low-acuity cases to alternative pathways or self-care, and provide positive patient outcomes and experience.

• Proactive risk management and oversight: The VCCC maintains real-time visibility of access issues and adjusts oversight strategies based on electricity and communication limitations experienced by patients.

• Provision of continued contact, support and reassurance with Triple Zero (000) callers and patients to provide situational awareness and continued advice. These operational advancements ensure that NSW Ambulance maintains high-quality patient care during severe weather conditions, extreme resource depletion, and inaccessible patients experiencing delays in care in geographical location(s).

Excellence in Leadership The Patient Experience Project (PEP)

Queensland Ambulance Service

Team: Crystal Nelson

The Patient Experience Project (PEP) pilot successfully demonstrates excellence in leadership by creating a means of incorporating compliments within the clinical incident management framework to foster a patient-centric approach to improve patient outcomes and organisational learning. Traditional incident management has largely focused on adverse events, but the PEP pilot was a strategic initiative forming the first phase of the clinical incident management framework reinvention within the Queensland Ambulance Service (QAS). PEP emphasises and acknowledges the important value of compliments and the positive impact this has on both staff morale, but ultimately learning from positive patient experiences. By incorporating compliments into the clinical incident management framework reinvention, this broadens the scope to drive systemwide improvements.

At its core, PEP seeks to shift the focus of clinical incident management from a reactive, compliance-driven process to a proactive and learning-oriented model. PEPs' approach is to steer both compliments and clinical incidents in a direction of learning and prevention, where the opportunity to better understand the factors surrounding a compliment or an incident is explored. By embracing this approach, the QAS can identify systemic issues, promote staff morale, and implement changes that prevent the risk of future clinical incidents. This shift aligns with contemporary frameworks that emphasise learning from both successes and adverse events.

The PEP pilot facilitated a consistent approach to both compliments and patient safety variations with an improved reporting culture that fostered an environment for staff to safely raise concerns, acknowledge positive outcomes, the ability to identify and collect data, and relevant trends to both compliments and clinical incidents.

Excellence in Leadership Leadership in Growing our Communities' Lifesaving Capabilities

Wellington Free Ambulance

Team: Claire Carruthers, Rachel Evans

Five years ago, a change in senior leadership at Wellington Free Ambulance resulted in a change in emphasis and priority for The Lloyd Morrison Foundation Heartbeat Programme as a service to the community. Through the subsequent appointment of a growth-focused manager, this programme has been supported to increase by more than 1300%. This leadership decision has seen a recommitment from the philanthropist funding the programme, with the reach of the programme growing from around 500 participants a year to more than 7,000. This extraordinary growth increases our community’s ability to respond to a sudden cardiac arrest, which has immeasurable value to patients and families.

The Lloyd Morrison Foundation Heartbeat Community CPR Training programme has trained just over 42,000 people across Greater Wellington and Wairarapa in the ten years since it began. That is 7% of the population of the region served by Wellington Free Ambulance, meaning one in 14 people are trained in this vital lifesaving skill. In the last year alone, over 7,640 people completed the CPR skills training and how to use an AED.

This programme is unique as it is designed to be as accessible as possible to empower people from any background or community to undertake training and potentially save a life. We deliver this training free of charge to remove any financial barriers to this hugely important community capability.

Heartbeat focuses solely on the practical technique and rationale behind CPR, how important it is to immediately seek help, and access an AED to give the person suffering a sudden cardiac arrest the best chance of survival. The Out of Hospital Cardiac Arrest Registry 2023/2024 shows the impact this training is having across the Wellington Free Ambulance region, with the highest bystander CPR rate (80%) in six years. The training is delivered to people aged 5-105, and as well as training more than 42,000 people, the Heartbeat team have also installed and continues to maintain over 500 community AEDs across the region.

Wellington Free Ambulance works in partnership with a local philanthropist who shares our vision to have as many people as possible CPR trained and accessible AEDs across our region. The philanthropic donation provided through this cornerstone partnership fully funds all aspects of the programme and provides annual funding for one fully equipped frontline emergency ambulance.

Excellence in Leadership

Creating a Communication Accessible ServiceAV's Disability Inclusion Program

Ambulance Victoria

Team: Amber Smith, Joel Pearlman

Ambulance Victoria’s Disability Inclusion Program exemplifies strategic leadership in inclusive emergency healthcare by championing communication accessibility across all levels of the organisation. Driven by a bold vision to deliver equitable, person-centred care, the program leads transformational partnerships, workforce engagement, and evidence-based innovation to create a Disability Inclusive service and workplace.

Effective communication is critical for safe, high-quality emergency healthcare, influencing patient experiences, clinical outcomes, and operational effectiveness. The Communicating for Safety National Safety and Quality Health Service Standard and the CAA Patient Experience Survey reinforce the significant role accessible communication has to ensure safe, quality, and patient experience.

Recognising the urgency of addressing communication barriers, AV identified communication accessibility as a key strategic priority, with a clear mandate to lead change. One in seven Australians experiences communication disability with difficulties related to language, speech, literacy, social communication, voice, fluency, and sensory processing, compounded by barriers that can profoundly affect both patient and clinician decision-making and experience. AV responded by establishing impactful partnerships to build organisational capability and embed communication accessibility into every stage of patient care.

Demonstrated through the ”Best Care for People with Communication Disability” project – an initiative developed with Scope (Australia), people with lived experience, other partners, and funded by the Department of Social Services – the initiative introduced Accessible Communication training and the Emergency Healthcare Communication Book (EHCB), an innovative tool co-designed specifically for prehospital use. Championing service-wide implementation, the Disability Inclusion Program mobilised communication channels and champions to embed the EHCB into paramedic toolkits, incorporated Key Word Sign into paramedic training, and is exploring an electronic version to complement the rollout of iPads. These efforts ensure frontline teams are more confident, capable, and supported to deliver accessible communication practices.

Through an intersectional lens, the program has also addressed sensory disability and neurodivergence through collaborations with Awesome Auslan and Amaze. These impactful partnerships have made Deaf awareness, Auslan, and autism training available for all of AV’s workforce. Practical workforce and communityfacing multimedia and accessible resources have been co-designed to reduce sensory-related barriers that build workforce understanding and enable community preparedness in health emergencies.

Ongoing evaluation, novel research, workforce collaborations, and partnerships ensure continuous improvement, underpinning the Disability Inclusion Program's service-wide impact. The program continues to position AV as a national leader in inclusive, equitable emergency health care, offering a scalable model to share with other emergency services and jurisdictions.

Excellence in Leadership Volunteer Insights Survey

SA Ambulance Service

Team: Simone O'Dea, Quinn Adams, Amy Rush, Kate Deppeler

SA Ambulance Service (SAAS) relies on 1,300 dedicated volunteers to provide ambulance services across 80 regional locations. Understanding their experiences, challenges, and motivations is critical for retention, engagement, and continuous improvement. However, traditional feedback mechanisms often fail to capture the honest, meaningful input needed to drive real change.

To bridge this gap, the Volunteer Insights Survey was designed and implemented to encourage volunteers to provide meaningful, in-depth, and high-quality feedback on their volunteering experiences. Our goal was to create a survey that volunteers genuinely wanted to complete and to generate valuable insights to inform future improvements in volunteer support and programs that impact volunteers.

A collaborative and structured approach to the survey design was adopted. Key focus areas included engagement, support, culture, and overall volunteer experience. The SAAS Volunteer Health Advisory Council (SAASVHAC) played an important role in the survey’s design, ensuring it accurately reflected the concerns and perspectives of volunteers. By involving volunteers in the development process, we fostered trust and reinforced the importance of their input.

The survey was developed in-house and tailored specifically to the SAAS volunteer experience. It addressed gaps left by previous engagement methods. A variety of question formats, such as multiple-choice, Likert scale ratings, and open-ended responses, were used, which allowed us to gather both quantitative data for trend analysis and qualitative insights to better understand the volunteer journey.

A comprehensive communication strategy maximised participation. Through targeted messaging across multiple platforms, we successfully increased awareness and engagement, resulting in an impressive 40% response rate.

The demographics of the respondents demonstrated strong representation across all clinical levels, years of service, and geographic regions, ensuring a well-rounded perspective.

Volunteers provided over 1,900 qualitative responses, offering rich, actionable insights. The high response rate and rich feedback received highlight the value of designing engagement strategies that resonate with volunteers. By asking the right questions in the right way, we unlocked meaningful feedback that will directly inform future volunteer retention and support initiatives.

This project sets a benchmark for volunteer engagement within SAAS, demonstrating that well-designed surveys, supported by a thoughtful communication strategy, can result in meaningful feedback. These findings will guide how we support volunteers, ensuring they feel valued, heard, empowered, and helped. The response rate to the Volunteer Insights Survey demonstrates the power of listening to volunteers and acting on their feedback to build a stronger, SAAS build a stronger, more sustainable volunteer workforce.

Excellence in Leadership Support for Perimenopause and Menopause in the Workplace

St John WA

Team: Karen Stewart

Since 2023, St John WA (SJWA) has taken significant strides to elevate awareness around menopause and foster a culture of inclusivity and belonging for those experiencing this natural transition. Spearheaded by Karen Stewart, General Manager of Ambulance Operations – Rural and Remote, SJWA achieved “The Menopause Friendly Accreditation” - which represents excellence in workplace menopause support - in February 2025, the first Australian emergency service to do so.

Despite its universal impact, menopause remains stigmatised, and with increased life expectancy, women face menopausal transition during their peak career years. A staggering 70% of women feel uncomfortable discussing their symptoms at work, which include hot flushes, insomnia, joint pain, cognitive difficulties, fatigue, anxiety, and physical discomfort (refer to menopausefriendly.au/home/menopause-at-work).

Perimenopause, which can begin an average of ten years before menopause occurs, often goes unrecognised due to limited education and awareness among healthcare providers. Many women are prescribed antidepressants instead of evidence-based treatments such as Hormone Replacement Therapy (refer to the SchofieldKhan2014 paper).

In ambulance services, these challenges are compounded by physically demanding roles and uniforms ill-suited to women’s needs, particularly those experiencing menopause symptoms. SJWA has worked to dismantle this stigma through education, advocacy, and structural reforms. Karen has been at the forefront, publishing articles and speaking at industry forums, including the Council of Ambulance Authorities (CAA) Women in Leadership Symposium and a Menopause Webinar, accessible internally and on YouTube for public viewing.

Internally, Karen established a Menopause Working Group to drive change within SJWA. This group secured Executive Leadership endorsement and a dedicated training budget, resulting in Advocate and Champion training and the launch of a Masterclass Webinar Series for 2024. Additionally, the organisation has focused on raising awareness through educational campaigns, visibility in leadership discussions, and resources such as a Menopause Hub for reliable information on SJWA’s intranet platform Connect.

Early instances of dismissive attitudes and misunderstandings underscore the importance of this work. One manager suggested that Karen avoid the topic to prevent it from being seen as a feminist movement, while others trivialised the experiences of their colleagues. These challenges only reaffirmed Karen’s commitment to SJWA to break down barriers through open communication, accountability, and management development.

By leading this change, Karen is setting a new benchmark at SJWA in supporting women and men through menopause, ensuring the workforce feels valued, supported, and empowered to thrive in their careers while fostering a culture of equality and inclusion.

Mental Health & Wellbeing Excellence in

First introduced in 2021, this category recognises innovation and excellence a service has provided both staff and patients in improvements in mental health and wellbeing, including programmes, training and support. When making their submission to this category, each service is encouraged to share their undertakings in mental health and wellbeing for all stakeholders in the ambulance sector, including patients, staff, and leaders.

Sponsored by

Excellence in Mental Health & Wellbeing

Ambulance Tasmania SitRep AppGraduate Wellbeing Initiative

Ambulance Tasmania

Team: Mike Conacher

Ensuring the mental health and wellbeing of our people underpins everything we do.

We acknowledge that wellbeing is everyone’s responsibility and are committed to ensuring we continue to improve mental health literacy, reduce stigma associated with seeking support, and continue to deliver the very best evidence-based support available. A recent addition to our Wellbeing Support Program has been the introduction of a Grad Buddy Program and online monthly Wellbeing SitRep App. The Grad Buddy Program is designed to pair new graduate paramedics with Ambulance Tasmania Wellbeing Support Peers to provide them with wellbeing support from the commencement of their induction program. Whilst the grad buddy does not replace the crucial role of the graduates' manager/supervisor about clinical competency and performance, the role of the grad buddy involves:

• A point of contact outside of direct leadership and management to discuss how things are going.

• One-on-one/individual support (emotional, practical, or social support).

• Support to establish a sense of belonging and connection within the organisation.

• Provide current, accurate, and relevant mental health or wellbeing information.

• Support, encourage and empower the grads to maintain and improve their mental health and wellbeing.

• Information and referral to professional counselling or other relevant services.

• A conduit to refer issues and challenges back to managers/supervisors and the Wellbeing Program Officer to help us better understand what can be improved in the graduate paramedic experience.

The Wellbeing SitRep App is a confidential online monthly report completed by the graduate paramedic that is monitored by the Wellbeing Program Officer. Designed to embed a knowledge and understanding of our programs and supports, it is an innovative early intervention tool, utilising technology to engage, support, and empower our grads to proactively manage their wellbeing.

Centred around six wellbeing protective factors, our grads are required to reflect on our mental health continuum and rate their current eating habits, quality of sleep, weekly exercising habits, work-life balance, socialisation with family/friends, and their sense of belonging/connection as a member of Ambulance Tasmania. The responses are tracked and can be mapped over time, grads can access appropriate online resources through the SitRep, and built-in trigger alerts ensure that proactive and timely access to further supports can be facilitated by the Wellbeing Program Officer. This ensures that from the very beginning of their career, we prioritise the wellbeing of our paramedics.

Excellence in Mental Health & Wellbeing

NSW Ambulance

Women’s

Health Programs

NSW Ambulance

Team: Emma Ugarte

Women working in emergency services face distinct health challenges related to the physical demands of the job and the unique life stages they experience. Two major life transitions - perimenopause and pregnancy - often come with symptoms that can be disruptive in the workplace, but for many years, these issues were not openly addressed. With our number of female staff increasing and reaching gender parity across many areas of NSW Ambulance, it was timely that a review of women’s health support was undertaken.

After consulting with staff and identifying a gap in resources and support, the Health and Fitness Team at NSW Ambulance initiated a series of programs aimed at improving the wellbeing of female staff, particularly during the perimenopausal, menopausal, and perinatal stages. We created a Menopause Hub that consolidates evidence-based information, resources, and support to help staff navigate the challenging symptoms associated with menopause.

This Hub serves as an accessible, ongoing resource for women to access practical strategies, expert advice and peer support to manage their wellbeing during this life stage. Additionally, we developed a Perinatal Support Group for female staff who are navigating pregnancy, maternity leave, and the transition back to work. This group provides comprehensive support, including exercise programs, nutrition guidance, information on parental leave processes, and a safe space for discussing concerns.

Further, recognising the importance of supporting the physical comfort of our staff and patients, our team successfully lobbied for the introduction of sanitary items in ambulances, which was approved under the Clinical Equipment and Ergonomics Working Group. This initiative ensures that both female staff and patients are supported during their shifts, particularly in emergencies.

The positive impact of these programs is already evident. Staff report feeling more supported, informed, and equipped to manage the health challenges they face in these stages of life, both at work and in their personal lives.

Excellence in Mental Health & Wellbeing

NSW Ambulance Shift Workers

Wellbeing Guide

NSW Ambulance

Team: Emma Ugarte

Shift workers face unique health challenges, including disrupted sleep, unpredictable mealtimes, increased stress, and difficulty maintaining regular physical activity. This places them at higher risk of various health conditions.

Feedback and conversations have highlighted common areas of concern, with staff requesting access to information and strategies to support their wellbeing. With limited human resources available to assist a growing workforce, the Staff Health Team needed an efficient way to empower staff.

We developed a first-of-its-kind, comprehensive, scalable, and educational resource that equips NSW Ambulance staff with the knowledge and tools to manage their health effectively. The resource needed to transparently address the health risks associated with shift work and provide evidence-based, practical strategies to mitigate these risks.

Guided by staff insights, a multidisciplinary team developed the Shift Worker Wellbeing Guide. This 100-page resource explores key areas such as circadian rhythm management, mental wellbeing, sleep, nutrition, and physical activity. It offers practical, actionable strategies tailored to the unique needs of first responder shift workers.

The guide has been widely praised for its accessibility and effectiveness. A staff survey revealed 80% of respondents felt more supported in their wellbeing after using the guide, while 85% reported making or intending to make positive lifestyle changes based on its recommendations. The survey also captured specific changes implemented by staff, demonstrating real-world applications:

• Improved time and fatigue management strategies for better sleep.

• Increased physical activity through shorter, more frequent exercise routines.

• Adoption of healthier eating habits, especially during night shifts.

• Establishing morning routines, like early sunlight exposure to enhance energy levels.

• Notable improvements in mental wellbeing through mindfulness and allocating time for self-care activities.

Its success has extended beyond our organisation, with emergency service agencies and health organisations nationally and internationally requesting to share the resource with their staff to assist their wellbeing.

Excellence in Mental Health and Wellbeing Suicide Intervention Response & Engagement Network (SIREN)

Ambulance Victoria

Team: Dr. Megan Dobbie, Rochelle Egan, Kaitlyn Harrington, Mark Tyler

An innovative suicide education and intervention training package developed by Ambulance Victoria (AV) staff, for Ambulance Victoria staff, has been successfully implemented across the organisation, with results indicating statistically significant improvement across all key measures.

SIREN is an online learning module that aims to increase awareness and provide education on suicide intervention to all employees and first responders. Importantly, SIREN is not professional development aimed at treating patients, rather, it is a purpose-built initiative to improve employees’ and first responders’ ability to identify and respond to colleagues or staff members at risk.

Additionally, the SIREN program offers a face-to-face training component focused on the practical application of suicide intervention skills to employees such as Operational Managers and Peer Support Responders who may work with higher-risk staff cohorts.

SIREN was developed by the AV Psychology team in response to our own biannual Psychosocial Survey, which found that AV employees and first responders were reporting increased levels of suicidal thoughts and behaviours over time.

Numerous steps were taken during SIREN's development to ensure it was evidence-based and able to effectively meet the needs of our people, including an extensive literature review, engagement with key stakeholders, and the gathering of lived experience testimonies from our workforce.

SIREN was made available to the whole organisation in May 2024. An initial program evaluation completed in mid-June 2024 compared the pre- and post-program surveys of approximately 1,450 participants, measuring knowledge, comfort and competence/confidence about suicide awareness, and intervention.

All survey items showed a statistically significant improvement at the p<.001 level, with all effect sizes within the large range. These results indicated that participants not only reported significant improvements across all items, but that we can be confident that the SIREN program itself is responsible for this change. Such findings demonstrate the real-world applicability and utility of this training within the suicide prevention literature, and potentially across the emergency services sector more generally.

Since the initial evaluation, approximately 56% of our organisation has successfully completed the SIREN online module, suggesting a real desire and motivation to engage with this topic.

We hope to see the wider impacts of SIREN on participant responses to our next Psychosocial Survey; we further hope that these findings encourage the broader ambulance community on the utility of suicide prevention programs for our people.

Excellence in Mental Health and Wellbeing Injury Management Support — Early Intervention Physiotherapy Program

St John WA

Team: Michael Newbound, Emma Brown, Jo McLaren, Altina Cotter

St John WA (SJWA) has become a leader in Lost Time Injuries management, having reduced its LTIFR by 66 per cent, with a cost saving of $1.25 million based on modelling of its Pilot Early Intervention Physiotherapy Program (EIPP) launched in April 2024.

The EIPP was designed to improve team wellbeing and support by giving access to best practice injury management following physical injury in the workplace. Whilst SJWA has a well-established Employee Assistance Program (EAP) for early access to psychosocial support, the same service did not exist for physical injuries.

Furthermore, SJWA’s Injury Management Support (IMS) team recognised the stress associated with undergoing workers compensation, which was the existing option for management of injuries in the workplace. Anxiety or apprehension about lodging a compensation claim could lead to under-reporting of injury, a higher incidence of self-management, and further aggravation of the injury.

To improve the support available to team members for EIPP, IMS engaged external provider Biosymm WA to assist in triage and management of musculoskeletal injuries in the workplace with physiotherapy treatment. The provider delivered a 24hr/seven day per week telehealth triage service to ensure immediate access to initial triage, ensuring best practice injury management following workplace injury at no cost to the team member.

The EIPP provides an early intervention support service in addition to workers' compensation, with the option to lodge a compensation claim at any point of the injury process. The pilot ran for six months in departments with operational team members who are exposed to higher rates of physical injury risk due to the nature of their patient-facing/manual handling roles.

Throughout the six-month pilot, IMS received fewer workers' compensation claims in the calendar year than in the previous five years of recorded claims data, corresponding with the increase in EIPP Claims. Following the successful implementation of the pilot, it was extended for a further three months before an expansion was approved to include all team members in the organisation. SJWA can now support workers with physical and psychosocial support to improve Mental Health and Wellbeing in the workplace.

Excellence in Mental Health and Wellbeing 2030 Staff Health Strategy

The National St John Ambulance Service of Papua New Guinea

Team: Dr Isaac Tranter, Dr Arabella Koliwan, Dr Annabelle Chalk, Dr Mangu Kendino, Alexander Dimain, Matthew Cannon

The National St John Ambulance Service of Papua New Guinea (NStJA) 2030 Staff Health Strategy was commissioned to address the unique health challenges faced by ambulance staff in Papua New Guinea (PNG). The strategy draws on findings from the 2024 NStJA Staff Health Needs Assessment, which was a comprehensive consultation and literature review process aimed at providing the evidence base for this strategy.

The 2030 Staff Health Strategy will serve as a roadmap for how the organisation can effect meaningful change and improve the health and wellbeing of all staff. The strategy is comprised of four overarching goals, which include:

Goal 1 – Improve staff access to primary health care

Goal 2 – Strengthen staff psychological wellbeing.

Goal 3 – Reduce lifestyle-related health risks

Goal 4 – Optimise workplace health and safety

Underlying these goals are eleven objectives and 37 actions. Targeted initiatives such as the establishment of a primary and preventive care clinic, will give staff access to healthcare, which, until now, was unaffordable or inaccessible to most.

A mental health peer support program will serve as an avenue for all staff to access psychological support through a colleague trained in mental health first aid. A comprehensive health promotion framework has been designed to combat the rising burden of non-communicable disease in PNG.

Finally, the strategy outlines an approach to combating workplace injury and illness. Ambulance officers are exposed to significant threats of occupational violence and infectious disease daily, and the implementation of policies and procedures to protect staff has been incorporated into the roadmap. The staff health strategy prioritises solutions that ensure equitable access to healthcare and health protection while promoting a culture of health and wellbeing throughout the organisation.

As of February 2025, four actions have been completed, and substantial progress has been made on eleven more.

The Star Award

Chosen from amongst each of the six category winners, the Star Award is the ultimate recognition of excellence in the ambulance sector.

A Star Award winner is recognised as doing something uniquely innovative in the ambulance sector, ultimately leading to better patient outcomes. Sponsored by

Women in Leadership Symposium

NOV 2025 12

HOTEL GRAND CHANCELLOR

Brisbane, Australia

The CAA Women in Leadership Symposium is an empowering one-day event designed to foster and celebrate female leadership in the ambulance and pre-hospital sector.

This dynamic symposium aims to unlock the hidden potential of women currently in leadership roles or aspiring to take the next step in their careers.

Attendees can expect a rich program featuring:

• Practical skills development and tools for career advancement

• Inspiring talks from industry leaders and successful women in ambulance services

• Networking opportunities with like-minded professionals

• Announcement of the annual Women in Leadership Scholarship winner.

Tickets now on sale via caa.net.au/symposium

Visit caa.net.au/symposium and subscribe to receive updates about the 2025 Women in Leadership Symposium, other news, offers and information from CAA.

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