St John WA launches new strategy

St John WA has unveiled a new strategic plan and shared a decrease in workplace injuries for 2024 in its latest impact report.

The eighth biggest not-for-profit organisation in Western Australia has launched a fresh strategy to improve safety, wellbeing and innovation in health service delivery, by increasing community connection, volunteer support, and preventative care.

St John WA recorded its lowest lost time injury frequency rate (LTIFR) in three years at the end of the 2024 financial year.

The LTIFR is a standard safety metric used to measure injuries in the workplace caused by lost time, which St John WA chief executive Kevin Brown told Business News had halved in the last 12 months to a rate of 25.6.

“[We’ve] seen the number of injuries resulting from violence and aggression reduce as well, which is really important,” he added.

“There's still far too many of them. It's reduced from 82 injuries to 54, but that’s still 54 too many.

“We provided a lot of training and coaching to our teams in terms of deescalating difficult circumstances so that such teams can actually go home in one piece, mentally and physically, which is really important.”

While urgent care remains as a high priority for St John WA, preventative medical care in the form of first aid training has been another area of major focus.

“We do that at 91 locations across the state and last year, we trained over 321,000 people in first aid and that included 80,000 kids … as part of our charitable program to teach kids first aid in school,” Mr Brown said.

“What we're trying to do with the way that we're structured is to prevent people from hurting themselves in the first place, and that's mentally and physically.

“We do a lot of first aid training, not just the physical training – the traditional training – but mental health too, and we're actually expanding that and customising into different sectors, whether that's for apprentices, the construction industry, young families, or families that are perhaps dealing with elderly parents and the different challenges that that brings.”

St John WA has recently launched a new volunteer advocacy group and newly-created a head of volunteering job role.

Craig Spencer was promoted to this position in October, transitioning from his former role as senior project coordinator.

Mr Brown said the volunteer advocacy group created the opportunity for volunteers to collaborate and express to St John WA how to better support them and their service delivery.

“[That group has] representatives from all the different regions in the state that work together and represent their colleagues to help us understand how we better meet their needs, but also that of the respective communities, which have such distinct needs,” Mr Brown.

“There’s over 9,000 people in our team, whether they're paid or volunteers.

“That’s roughly 6,000 volunteers and 3,000 paid team members and they are part of the community.

“Connecting is a challenge and that's something we have to overcome with the geography … we’ve got 196 different locations across the state that we operate out of, so being able to connect is important because we're actually in a lot of communities when there's not many other organisations there."

St John WA officially launched the first Auslan interpreting service in Australia in April this year to improve emergency care for patients who are deaf or hard of hearing.

As part of the initiative, the organisation partnered with deaf-owned and operated Convo Australia to provide ambulance crews and health centres with access to interpreters through video call.

“We’re really proud to be the first operator or ambulance provider in Australia to provide that Auslan frontline real time conversion,” Mr Brown said.

“So, then every member in the community has got the ability to engage with us, so we can find them the best care.

“We’re continually looking to improve and we're certainly happy to be leading the way in cardiac arrest rates or those Auslan capabilities that technology brings us to better look after the community we serve.

“Some of the other investments we've been working on in terms of becoming a better organisation was our extended care paramedics and our mental health [ambulance] co-response vehicle, which has just recently been launched.”

Mr Brown said the extended care paramedics are specialists who treat patients in their homes, reducing strain on WA’s emergency department.

“In the last year, there was nearly 218,000 people we treated at home, online, or were taken to more appropriate facilities to get the treatment as such that they don't actually need to wait and basically to clog up the emergency department,” Mr Brown said.

St John WA’s impact report also confirmed there were more than 90 built-form projects in development across the state, which Mr Brown said was necessary as the organisation expanded.

“As we grow as an organisation and the needs change in communities, we need to open up in new areas,” he said.

“We need larger depots. Our fleet of 1,000 vehicles need to be maintained, they need to be parked, they need to be in locations where they can best respond.

“We have many established locations where we need to refurbish our buildings, and … we need to make them more secure with CCTV and fences and gates to keep the teams that are operating them safe. It’s a constant investment.

“We've got 196 locations across the state that we look after and 91 first aid training locations to look after.

“We are the leader in that field (first aid training), and we truly intend to stay there, so we have to provide good facilities that are fit for purpose.”

Mr Brown became St John WA chief executive in January 2023.