Spotlight on Jane Worrallo – Emergency Operation Centre (EOC) Incident Controller
Date published: 03 May 2021
Author: Anna Sale
Jane’s role is focused on the rollout of the COVID-19 vaccinations as well as other related jobs like coordinating our response for COVID-safe site visits, reviewing communications, and supporting changing processes in services like Patient Transport Service.
About the roll out
“Rolling out the COVID-19 vaccination to all our staff around NSW is huge exercise with enormous logistics. It’s also an evolving process – we’re adapting all the time.
We started with three vaccine centres at Westmead, Liverpool and Royal Prince Alfred (RPA) but more centres are coming online all the time. We have appointed Vaccine Centre Leads to look after the different centres. They work with managers to coordinate the process of getting our staff booked in and registered for their vaccination if they choose to get it.
There’s a lot of juggling and scheduling involved to make sure we’re giving staff the opportunity to be vaccinated during work time while also making sure we don’t impact service delivery by having too many staff away at once.
This is particularly challenging in smaller, regional areas where we might, for example, have a one-day-only clinic at a Multi-Purpose Service to vaccinate all staff and residents.
The thing I reflect on is that this has all been stood up from nothing, we’ve never had to do this before. When the vaccine centres are being set up by the LHDs, they’ve got to factor in finding the space, training staff, organising storage, making up the vaccine correctly with experienced people, minimising waste. There are so many small elements, but they are all critical in making things run smoothly.”
Supporting our people
“There are lots of people involved in making sure our staff feel supported through the process. In Food & Patient Support Services (FPSS), for example, we have staff members who are acting as liaison points for the Sector Managers which has been incredibly useful, especially for the bigger sites. They are working at a site level with managers to organise some of the logistics like transport, who can go when, and stepping staff through the process of registering online. They are playing an invaluable role in making sure the process is not overwhelming for people.
We’ve also been holding regular Q &A sessions through MS Teams where Anne Mok, Director Clinical Governance & Safety, has been answering people’s questions about the vaccinations.”
About the opportunity
“It’s a really busy, challenging job but I’m learning a huge amount about HealthShare and Health – how it all works – and about NSW geography as well! It’s also been very interesting in relation to my
role as Knowledge Manager – how can we manage information in the best way to make sure people are being informed without being overwhelmed? Working out how to communicate with people in a rapid way so they can get the information they need quickly.”
Final thoughts?
“This experience has opened my eyes to how many people are involved – there are teams of people across the organisation working really hard to make things run smoothly. There’s also an enormous amount of goodwill. It’s amazing to see how people will step into quite difficult situations willingly and just put their head down and get things done. It might seem enormous and hard, but people are happy to give their time and goodwill to get the job done. It’s fantastic to see and be part of.”
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