West Gippsland Healthcare Group (WGHG) is a medium sized, rural public health service delivering critical Acute, Maternity, Subacute, Community and Aged Care services to Warragul and the surrounding area.
Rural health services such as WGHG feel the effects of a shrinking labour force earlier and more keenly than Metropolitan services.
WGHG employ approximately 1400 staff with additional volunteers. They provide immunisation programs for staff, volunteers and community members. In addition to annual immunisation programs, all staff are screened on commencement by the Infection Prevention Control team to ensure they are vaccinated and protected from infection according to the role they have within the organisation.
That is a lot of vaccinating!
In 2020 when the Government mandated all vaccinations must be recorded on the Australian Immunisation Register (AIR) Coralie Tyrrell, IPC Manager knew they had to do things differently.
They simply did not have the administrative or IPC resources to enter each immunisation on AIR. In her words ‘We have to work smarter, not harder’.
WGHG were early adopters of the OnePassport | Immunise system. The register had been part of the full OnePassport | Comply system however did not have the integration with AIR.
In 2020 after going through an extensive process OnePassport | Immunise became accredited and integrated with the AIR system.
Since then WGHG implemented OnePassport | Immunise and is now able to upload multiple vaccination records concurrently to AIR saving huge amounts of administrative time. Not limited to COVID vaccines the system includes the ability to store serology and mask fit test results as well as the full range of vaccinations available on AIR.
WGHG have managed the rollout of OnePassport | Immunise carefully and cleverly, taking a stepwise approach matching the resources available and during a chaotic time. This year the team rolled out the OnePassport App to enable their staff to send information directly to their records in the system. This, along with the ability of OnePassport to retrieve records from AIR, has shaved further administrative hours/money from the program.
OnePassport and WGHG have worked collaboratively throughout the past 2 years to further improve the system and build functionality that helps all users.
We are very fortunate to have such innovative and future thinking healthcare professionals out in our rural communities.