Western Health manages four acute public hospitals – Sunshine Hospital (including Joan Kirner Women’s and Children’s), Footscray Hospital, Williamstown Hospital and Bacchus Marsh – and other care facilities in Sunbury, Williamstown, Melton, Bacchus Marsh and Caroline Springs.

In 2022, Western Health was the Victorian Worksafe 2022 Award winner for Commitment to Prevention of Mental Injury in the Workplace and joint winner of Workplace Health and Safety Solution of the Year.

Welcome to another edition of Fast Five – our fortnightly series where we ask Victoria’s most influential and exceptional business leaders five questions to get a behind-the-scenes look at some of Australia’s most dynamic businesses.

In this edition we spoke to Western Health Chief Executive Officer, Adjunct Professor Russell Harrison.

Prof. Harrison started his career in Britain with the National Health Service (NHS). Over a period of 16 years he held numerous executive roles ranging in sectors such as mental health, acute care, community care and as a commissioner of health services. He moved to Melbourne to join Western Health as Executive Director Operations in February 2013.

#1: How did the COVID-19 pandemic change Western Health’s operations and how is the situation now?

It just got really challenging but the team did a great job. We cared for significant numbers of very sick patients in the early days, pre-vaccinations but the vaccination has certainly helped keep people safe.

The situation remains pretty volatile. We’re still supporting people in the community that are too ill for primary care, but not enough to come into hospital. We’re still seeing hospitalisations and people that are sadly dying from COVID.

We’re in a bit of a strange world where outside hospital it’s no mask and everything’s returning to normal. Inside hospital, it’s still a COVID pandemic mode. It’s still challenging for our staff because they have to operate in full personal protective equipment all of the time.

#2: Other diseases and human needs don’t stop during a pandemic. How do you how do you balance those needs?

It got really tricky to be honest. We had to cut back some of our services that we could choose not to do.

The biggest change for us was we had to pretty much stop doing elective surgery. We shut down most of our outpatient services and moved to telehealth.

Outpatients slowed down and so did the procedures. We were trying to create capacity for the emergency patients that came in.

It was really hard balancing that day-to-day operational requirement of all those people that need our services against all those COVID patients. We had to really change how we did things and the way that we protected our staff almost overnight and had to keep reinventing that.

#3: How do you prepare your systems for changes in population in the west?

I think the latest count has about 159 different languages and dialects spoken in the west. It’s a widely diverse community continuing to grow even through COVID. Babies still got born – it was another record year for births out west.

Melton and Wyndham are big growth areas. The land is still relatively cheap and there are lots of houses being built. So we continue to work with government and other agencies to put forward business cases for infrastructure and future growth.

We got Joan Kirner Women’s and Children’s Hospital and the new ED at Sunshine. We got the new Footscray Hospital. I think that’s the biggest social infrastructure investment in the state ever.

We’ve also got Melton Hospital being built in the near future as well, so that process will start in earnest now that’s been fully funded.

We are continuing to build facilities to keep pace with the population growth. We are coming a little bit from behind but all the new facilities will certainly help support a growing community that shows no signs of slowing down.

#4: The communities in the western areas are very culturally rich. How do you work on community engagement to promote health and wellbeing?

We’re fortunate we have a public health unit. We were one of the three metropolitan public health units the government set up to help deal with COVID, but that also means that we can get involved in other areas of health promotion and prevention work.

Our biggest asset is our 11,500 staff, of which about 68 per cent live in our catchment population. They’re fabulous ambassadors to take those messages out into our community and back to their family and relatives. We do try and use our staff as great ambassadors of the message.

We work with our local government areas and we try support most initiatives to do as much health promotion as we can.

#5: What are some exciting developments or research Western health is currently involved with?

There are always exciting developments out here. In the research space, we’re doing a lot of work around Sarcopenia, which is a form of aging disease where muscles waste.

We’re doing a lot of work in the falls prevention space. There’s been some good work on social prescribing as a means of supporting people with different pathways to do that with chronic pain.

We’re taking on lots of clinical trials for cancer medications we do with our population. Sadly, they have a high burden of disease.

We’re also doing a lot in the digital space by using information and decision support tools. We’re building a platform to hopefully bring in artificial intelligence to support patient care as well.