Acacia Prison’s healthcare team has been recognised with a global award for single-mindedly improving its care of patients in prison while also improving staff morale and making the prison healthcare centre a great place to work.
The Serco Global Pulse Pride Award recognised the healthcare team’s commitment to improving patient wait times and overall patient satisfaction.
Acacia Prison Director David Thompson said that health services played an important role ensuring the ongoing welfare of prisoners and helped to support rehabilitation and reintegration programs.
Mr Thompson said: “Two years ago, our patients were telling us that we could do better. This had a flow-on negative impact on staff satisfaction levels and our ability to work well together.”
“With our team of medical professionals, we looked at better ways of managing healthcare in the prison and identifying changes that would make a difference for staff and prisoners.
“Practice changes meant that prisoner wait times dropped from nine to two weeks, without any drop in the quality of healthcare. The wider community also benefited, as through our new patient treatment model we reduced the use of community ambulances by 70 percent, and that cost would have been borne by the community.”
Serco Asia Pacific CEO Mark Irwin said the changes were part of Serco’s overall philosophy to deliver safe, secure and humane services in prisons.
“Acacia’s health services are fully accredited to a level of a community General Practitioner,” Mr Irwin said. “Acacia has 1700 prisoners, many with acute health issues and our healthcare team have shown an impressive commitment to their patients and each other, in making rapid improvements to their standard of healthcare delivery in just two years.”
The Acacia team was presented with this award by Serco Group Chief Executive Rupert Soames at an event marking the company’s Asia Pacific winners of its Global Pulse Awards. The awards celebrate employees from among Serco’s 50,000 strong team around the world who have done extraordinary things for their colleagues, customers or communities.
Serco Asia Pacific (Australia, New Zealand, Hong Kong) employs over 9,000 staff and this year won nine Global Pulse awards.
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