Charity group St John WA has stepped into the new year armed with a refreshed strategic plan designed to increase preventative care training, support for volunteers and connection across communities.
While urgent care remains as the priority for the eighth-biggest charity in Western Australia, chief executive Kevin Brown said preventative medical care in the form of first-aid training was a 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 we’re structured is prevent people from hurting themselves in the first place. 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 brings.”
Mr Brown told Business News educating people to deliver adequate first aid reduced strain on emergency services and facilities.
“If we do that well enough then less people have to rely on doctors, nurses and GP practices, and hopefully less people are using urgent care centres and there’s less people in such an [urgent] situation that they need to go to hospital,” he said.
“We’re always going to be there to provide normal services, but our ultimate strategy is looking at what we can do to help people look after themselves better, so they don’t progress through to more extreme responses.
“It’s important that we look after our volunteers too, and look after their evolving needs.”
St John WA recently launched a volunteer advocacy group and created a head of volunteering job position to improve support for its volunteer workforce.
Senior project co-ordinator Craig Spencer was appointed to the role in October.
Mr Brown said the position, coupled with the new advocacy group, created opportunities for increased collaboration between volunteers and enabled them to better express their needs to St John WA.
“[That group has] representatives from all the different regions in the state that work together and represent their colleagues to help us understand how to better meet their needs, but also that of their respective communities, which have such distinct needs,” he said.
“There’s over 9,000 people in our team. That’s roughly 6,000 volunteers and 3,000 paid team members and they are part of the community.
“We’re actually wired for the community we serve, and it’s a rather large community because we are the largest ambulance jurisdiction in the world for geographical area, being in this beautiful [state].
“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 where there’s not many other organisations there.”
One of the ways St John WA is enhancing connection is using innovative technological solutions.
It launched Australia’s first Auslan interpreting service in April 2024 to improve emergency care for patients who are deaf or hard of hearing.
As part of this initiative, St John WA partnered with deaf-owned and operated Convo Australia to provide ambulance crews and health centres with access to interpreters through video calls.
“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.
“Then every member in the community has the ability to engage with us so we can find them the best care.
“We’re continually looking to improve and we’re happy to be leading the way in … 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 is 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 were specialists who treated patients in their homes to reduce strain on emergency departments.
“In the last year, there were nearly 218,000 people we treated at home, online, or were taken to more appropriate facilities to get treatment [so] they don’t actually need to wait and basically clog up the emergency department,” he said.
St John WA recorded a decrease in workplace injuries for 2024, revealing its lowest lost-time injury frequency rate in three years.
The LTIFR is a standard safety metric used to measure injuries in the workplace caused by lost time, which Mr Brown said halved in the past 12 months.
“[We’ve] seen the number of injuries resulting from violence and aggression reduce as well, which is really important,” he said.
“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 de-escalating difficult circumstances so that such teams can actually go home in one piece, mentally and physically.”
Mr Brown said increasing incident reporting was another area of focus.
“We very much encourage our teams to report near-misses,” he said.
“I’ve seen a 75 per cent increase in our near-miss reporting, so we’ve actually got a chance to learn from issues when in an emergency to make sure it doesn’t become something more significant.
“People culture is really important. We regularly poll our teams on the culture and [ask] how they’re feeling about work and where the opportunities are to improve.”
St John WA has more than 90 built-form projects in development across WA to accommodate the not-for-profit’s growth.
“As we grow … and the needs change in communities, we need to open up in new areas,” Mr Brown said.
“We need larger depots. Our fleet of 1,000 vehicles need to be maintained, parked, [and] in locations where they can best respond.
“We have many established locations where we need to refurbish our buildings, and … we need to make more secure with CCTV and fences and gates to keep the teams 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.
“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.”
