Courtney Callen

During my time in the Development Bed Resource Manager role, I have gained valuable organisational-wide experience, whilst facilitating timely access to care. This role has demanded critical thinking in a fast-paced environment to ensure the effective utilisation of available beds and strategic planning within the organisation, which I believe that I was able to accomplish during my time in this role. This role has allowed my effective communication and leadership skills to be refined to ensure all key stakeholders are well-informed about patient flow expectations, ensuring the prioritisation of complex and challenging situations and the status of the organisation. This has been particularly essential when communicating with medical staff when negotiating direct admit transfers from other organisations to ensure the consideration of risk management, the safety of the patient and bed capacity is balanced safely and appropriately. This role has required a commitment to ensure excellence and accountability to deliver safe and effective healthcare by ensuring patients are provided with the right care at the right place at the right time.

During my time in the Care Coordination role, I have gained a better understanding of patient flow within Austin Health, across both acute and sub-acute sectors. This role has also given me an appreciation of the importance of a holistic approach to patient care and how that guarantees a safe discharge plan for our patients. This role has also ensured prioritisation of my workload, ensuring certain matters are escalated appropriately to the various multidisciplinary team professionals. This role has allowed me to work within an exceptional team, whilst also working autonomously to achieve organisational outcomes.

Throughout my employment on 8 East, I have been able to gain valuable skills relating to maximising patient flow, whilst continuously providing quality patient care and ensuring positive patient outcomes. I have consolidated my knowledge of patient flow and complex discharge planning. I possess a calm and strong leadership presence, critical thinking and efficient problem-solving abilities. Throughout my time as an ANUM, I have been able to work collaboratively as part of a multidisciplinary team to ensure effective and timely discharge planning to reduce patient length of stay, whilst promoting efficient discharge planning based on individual patient requirements. I possess excellent communication skills that allow for a strong development of therapeutic relationships with patients, their families and colleagues alike. This essential aspect of leadership ensures effective and efficient communication occurs to aid patient flow and to ensure that specific individual needs are met. This in turn allows comprehensive interaction with all aspects of care, ensuring that patient-centred care, autonomy and patient advocacy are at the forefront of my clinical practice. This is essential in the ANUM role to aid in patient flow, accommodate discharges and assist with the high acuity clinical workload. This includes having a strong ability to assess and prioritise specific patient needs in a fast-paced clinical environment while always ensuring high-quality patient care is provided.

Throughout this rotation I developed further knowledge with patient care largely involving post-stroke rehabilitation. I have gained insight into the rehabilitation process and I have been able to improve my clinical skills in areas of patient care that enable the patient to develop greater independence, detecting improvements and deterioration in patient health status and strengthening professional relationships within the allied health team. I was also able to gain leadership skills throughout MER calls and ensuring detection of clinical deterioration was escalated accordingly throughout my time on Ward 12 at the Austin repatriation campus.