Originally Published September 2019

https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/hospice-21st-century-paul-couper

How Mercy Hospice Auckland is transforming its services to meet the growing needs across New Zealand's largest city.

Mercy Hospice Auckland is one of five specialist palliative care Hospices in the greater Auckland region, having a population of more than 1.63M (or 1/3 of NZ).

With a workforce of 144 staff and over 600 volunteers, we care for everyone within what is known as the ADHB catchment area. As such we serve a population of 531,000. Mercy Hospice is contracted by ADHB to provide specialist palliative care services. Every year we care for approximately 1,100 patients. In ADHB, just over 2,100 people die every year (of all causes).

As we are a not for profit charity and don't charge for our services, we rely on donations, fundraising and a contract with ADHB to stay operational. Every year we have to raise over $4 Million and find new ways to care for the ever-growing need in Auckland with our very limited resources.

When I commenced as CEO Three years ago , Mercy Hospice already delivered world class care, with exceptional service, staff expertise and the best patient and family positive feedback I would argue in the world. But there was a problem, and a growing one. Our capacity to deliver care, education, support and new initiatives, was quickly being eroded by a funding gap that was growing by nearly 10% every year. Importantly, the growing and diverse population needs, demanded new ways to deliver care. Developing these are hugely costly to design and deliver.

Faced with some hard realities- it was clear Mercy Hospice had reached a tipping point.

Firstly, our income was at best, static. Secondly, we had a finite delivery resource in our highly experienced and expert workforce. Finally, we had an operational infrastructure that was very inefficient, using obsolete technology and systems highly dependent on manual processes.

In summary, like all charities, we needed to do more with less, to proactively and collaboratively build new models of care across the community, whilst growing our income. All the while, still ensuring our valuable teams remained supported, engaged and delivering world class care.

It was very clear, although we were providing best in class care across Auckland, we were operating in a fragmented and silo'd approach to care delivery. Mercy Hospice worked in a paper-based world, obsolete computer systems, excel spreadsheets abound, no Electronic Health Records with little information sharing. In fact, some staff didn’t have an email address.. And our colleagues at the hospitals, residential care facilities and out in the allied health world were not much better off.

Leading the team, we kicked off with Three major projects that underpinned our overall strategy. 1:Our Brand 2:Our infrastructure technology and 3:Our commercial activity plan.

Today's subject talks to our Technology Infrastructure. Over the course of Nine months, Mercy Hospice set out to replace all obsolete hardware and communication infrastructure. We migrated away from a Citrix environment, into Microsoft Office 365 and Microsoft Teams all to be delivered through Azure. Everything we did needed to meet our goals of being software as a service, cloud hosted, high availability and secure to the highest healthcare standards. It also had to save money (A lot of money). We purchased new hardware to enable a mobile workforce, and delivered an education and new IT support solution to ensure we could maximise the new way of working.

Moving from a traditional desktop to the new IT environment was actually a smooth transition from a change management perspective. Access to education and IT support was a critical investment that paid dividends, Given we had virtually no IT department until that point. Coupled with Microsoft Teams and other tools, like our new Intranet and Internet web sites -out-coming from our Brand project, all staff benefited hugely from better communication and access to information. As a side note, we also reduced our IT operating cost by over 50%.

Straight on the heels of that, came our Electronic Health Record (EHR). We literally chewed through two tonnes of paper a year and countless hours processing, storing, retrieving and shuffling paper clinical files. A massive project in itself spanning 12 months, the EHR project effectively replaced everything with a laptop or tablet. We chose a new vendor to the palliative care market Valentia technologies, who co designed and customised with us, their Indici product and designed it into a future-proof Palliative care delivery tool.

The huge transformation resulting is in the actual model of care. Now with open and collaborative standards-based communication, state of the art tools and increasing access to clinical information, Mercy Hospice is longer operating in a silo.

We are a partner in what I describe as a new eco-system of healthcare. We share information and workforce delivery that puts the patient at the centre of the care model wherever they are. We integrate with delivery teams, we can share critical information instantly anywhere, any time. As an example (while not talking in depth about our vendor product) the Indici system already is in use in many GP practices and recently chosen by a major Primary Healthcare Organisation (PHO), as well as with the St Johns Ambulance Service. With the inclusion of a patient portal, future integrations to additional services, Mercy Hospice is well positioned for our long term strategic goals in delivering Specialist Palliative Care to our city.

Stay tuned

https://rebrand.co.nz/branding-work/mercy-hospice/

coming soon

One of the more interesting projects I've worked on was creating a catering solution for a special wedding celebration. I quickly realised that renting or buying a caravan bar wasn’t the most cost-effective option, and my mind immediately started racing on how I could provide a better solution while also turning it into a potential business opportunity.

For some background, in a previous career as an engineer and fabricator, I had experience building trailers and various vehicles. So, building a caravan bar didn’t seem all that difficult. Plus, with my strong Kiwi “can-do” attitude, passed down through generations, I knew this was a project I was ready to take on.

I also wanted to maintain a vintage look for the bar, but I thought this was the perfect chance to learn something new: Fusion360 CAD design. My goal was to accurately recreate a classic design while adding a modern, sustainable twist, making it perfect for catering use.

I spent some time digitizing the design and creating a 3D model in Fusion360, which became the blueprint for the final shape and style. With a tight deadline of 60 days, I was able to fabricate and finish the bar, which I named "Vinnie," just in time for the wedding. It was a huge hit at the celebration!

While working on the bar, I also put together a website, an Instagram profile, and a business plan to build and rent out three more of these bars for events. The business plan showed strong potential and projected great success.

Just as things were starting to take off, another exciting opportunity came my way. The event rental company that had seen Vinnie at the wedding decided it would be a great addition to their growing business in the Coromandel. Vinnie became a popular and highly requested part of their event planning services and quickly became a staple in the Waikato and Coromandel regions, remaining fully booked out for events.

www.vintagecaravanbar.co.nz

https://www.instagram.com/vintagecaravanbar?igsh=MWszczZoMjAxaG93dA==