The Queensland Police Service G20 Group Media Communications and External Engagement Team established and maintained high quality communication and engagement with a diverse group of stakeholders for G20.
Spanning 18 months, the team’s approach to community engagement ensured all individuals and groups with an interest in G20 were actively engaged, openly and respectfully. Pivotal to the peaceful nature of lawful protests was the rapport the team developed with issue motivated group leaders.
Part of the BreastScreen Queensland Program, the multidisciplinary team at Brisbane Northside Service delivers a high quality, free breast cancer screening service. This service aims to reduce breast cancer morbidity and mortality by providing cost effective, accessible and equitable breast cancer screening services to the community.
Key achievements include screening 41,402 women for breast cancer in 2014–15; detecting 253 cancers in 2013–14; participation rates that are amongst the highest in Australia for Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander women; developing the first resource in Queensland for women with an intellectual disability; and hosting Queensland’s only Breast Cancer Family Clinic for women with a high risk of familial breast cancer.
The Department of Transport and Main Roads Customer Services Branch puts the customer at the centre of everything it does, ensuring the delivery of registration and licensing products and services in the best way possible.
By building a continuous improvement culture and focusing on digital first and customer experience in the workforce, this program has achieved significant improvements in the way it delivers services. By looking at things from a customer perspective, the branch has been able to provide clearer, simpler and faster services to the community.
Four public servants and their teams from three departments, including the Department of Housing and Public Works, Queensland Police Service and Department of Communities, Child Safety and Disability Service, banded together in the wake of a local tragedy that shocked the Cairns community. Forming the nucleus support in response to the deaths of eight children in a social housing property on Friday 19 December 2014, the team drove the response recovery for the grieving community.
Responding at many levels, this group worked long hours over extended periods, demonstrating courage, dedication and deep personal empathy. They were a constant source of strength to their colleagues, as many were in shock from knowing the family professionally or personally.
Inefficiencies in after-hours patient care shaped the idea for the OnCallogist mobile app. Empowering clinicians with real-time information, the app promotes communication between nurses and doctors, allowing for the provision of safe and timely patient care.
Developed at the Gold Coast University Hospital, the app has resulted in a 41 per cent reduction in completion times for patient care requests. Able to extract actionable data, the app aligns with best practices in user centred design, security and government ‘cloud-first’ policy. This solution is easily portable to other health districts.
In 2014 the Department of Communities, Child Safety and Disability Services, in conjunction with the sector and young people, developed an innovative solution to help young people transition to independence. Sortli, an app, helps young people organise their lives, while feeling connected to a support network, and has been downloaded more than 1700 times.
Child protection agencies across Australia have expressed an interest in updating Sortli for their cohorts of young people transitioning to independence. The department is now applying key learnings from the project to foster more innovative digital-based solutions to support young people through this transition.
An innovative control program to implement monitoring of feral pig movement and turtle nesting on remote turtle nesting beaches has been made possible with the provision of grant funding to the Nest to Ocean Turtle Protection Program. This program has been developed in response to the current threat that feral pigs pose to nesting turtles on the north east coast of the Cape York Peninsula, as they dig up and consume turtle nests within 24 hours of being laid.
Informed by the use of innovative aerial imagery to assess turtle nesting abundance, prioritise areas of pig activity and plan future control works, the team has implemented a multi-staged program using a number of control techniques to apply sustained pressure on the feral pig population over the turtle nesting season. Data collected has also provided information for other programs, including assessing rubbish accumulation on remote beaches.
Rainbow Gateway is the result of an inspired vision for an integrated learning, training, employment and housing solution for young Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islanders in remote Queensland areas. Teams from the Department of Housing and Public Works and TAFE Queensland North partnered with independent Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander construction company, Myuma Pty Ltd, to find new ways of providing training, pathways from training to long-term employment, and sustainable housing for Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander youth.
Nineteen trainees who were formerly unemployed have been recruited, and are working on vacant public housing properties. The program is expanding into other remote areas, with more to follow.
The Public Safety and Specialist Support (PS&SS) capability, part of the Queensland Police Service G20 Group, was established to develop, plan, train and provide command and command assistance in the areas of crowd management, public order, bomb search and response, public safety, maritime security operations, ready response capability and police tactical group operations for G20.
The PS&SS acquired $5 million worth of specialised equipment, and delivered and coordinated over 100,000 hours of training culminating in the successful deployment of over 2500 specialist police from Queensland, interstate and New Zealand services, making it Queensland’s most successful policing operation to date.
On Friday 20 February 2015, Cyclone Marcia crossed the coastline between St Lawrence and Yeppoon, travelling overland affecting hundreds of kilometres of power lines. At the height of the cyclone more than 63,700 customers were off-supply, with a total of 73,500 customers affected at some stage.
In response, more than 1000 Ergon Energy and Energex staff and third-party contractors worked tirelessly to restore supply to hard-hit communities. Within seven days of the cyclone, Ergon Energy restored more than 51,000 customers or 80 per cent of those impacted. The last were resupplied 10 days after the cyclone made landfall.
Established in 2014, QTravel is a fit-for-purpose, customer-focused travel solution that caters to more than 60,000 potential clients from 45 government agency groups. QTravel has successfully addressed the challenges of the previous system—what previously took up to four days booking time, now takes one to four minutes.
Integral to QTravel’s development and success was extensive consultation with other agencies, with all agencies benefitting from access to government-negotiated travel rates, highly competitive fees and robust reporting. QTravel has achieved savings of nearly $10 million to date and a 91 per cent adoption rate in the first three months.
Inefficiencies in after-hours patient care shaped the idea for the OnCallogist mobile app. Empowering clinicians with real-time information, the app promotes communication between nurses and doctors, allowing for the provision of safe and timely patient care.
Developed at the Gold Coast University Hospital, the app has resulted in a 41 per cent reduction in completion times for patient care requests. Able to extract actionable data, the app aligns with best practices in user centred design, security and government ‘cloud-first’ policy. This solution is easily portable to other health districts.
Following a devastating incident in Ravenshoe in June 2015, the Cairns and Hinterland Hospital and Health Service exhibited quick and coordinated planning, treating patients in facilities ill-equipped to accommodate serious burns patients. At midday a car driving down the main street in Ravenshoe unexpectedly veered off the road and slammed into the outer wall of a café. The impact from the car triggered a huge fireball that tore through the café, injuring 21 people.
Becoming the largest aeromedical movement of burns patients in Queensland, an enormous work load was placed on staff, with many working double shifts or cancelling leave to assist in the response. Eleven patients were later flown to southern hospitals.
Patient Safety First is an initiative to improve clinical governance at Mackay Hospital and Health Service. Adopting a system approach to engaging staff in the patient safety agenda, some of the actions taken included implementing a new clinical risk management framework that encourages incident reporting and a rapid response to investigating incidents, new death review processes and reviewing all complaints as a barometer of consumer experience.
Achievements include clearer accountability for patient safety, improved clinical engagement, improved incident reporting, rapid response in incident investigations and responsive actions. These have led to a positive culture change as patient safety becomes part of everyday business.
The Department of Environment and Heritage Protection issues invoices totalling approximately $40 million per year for annual fees for environmental authorities issued under the Environmental Protection Act. The Debt Management team secures payment of fees that have not been paid by the due date.
The team has achieved a paradigm shift in their approach to unpaid fees, with significant process improvements and results being obtained. This is of particular significance since revenue from annual fees became controlled revenue for the department in July 2013.
In response to the outbreak of the Ebola Virus Disease (EVD) in Africa, Queensland Health led an initiative to establish a level of preparedness in Queensland where a person with EVD could be rapidly identified, safely cared for and contained to decrease further risk of transmission.
Preparedness activities included implementing enhanced surveillance activities and establishing and implementing operational guidelines for clinical and public health management of people with suspected or confirmed EVD. The team also developed and published clinical, infection control and public health guidelines, and coordinated the assessment of all persons returning to Queensland from Ebola affected areas.
In 2012 Brisbane and Cairns were announced as hosts for G20 meetings, signalling a huge and complex security planning operation on a scale not previously seen in Queensland.
Using exemplary leadership, the senior leadership team fostered an environment of subordinate empowerment, trust, fellowship and mission focus. By encouraging personal and team development, sharing information and articulating its intent, the senior leadership team inspired staff to strive for excellence and innovation in delivering this security operation.
Established in 2011, the Flying Start Implementation (FSI) Program has since completed all projects in the program, moving year 7 from primary to secondary school in Queensland, and establishing junior secondary in state high schools for years 7 to 9.
This program represents the biggest single change to education in Queensland in years with funding of over $890 million to 2018, including almost $640 million over the four years of implementation. Highly complex and visible, this program spans most business areas of the Department of Education and Training, including 7 regions and 1234 state schools and 492 non-state high schools.
In 2014–15 the Department of Tourism, Major Events, Small Business and the Commonwealth Games pioneered a whole-of-government online service transformation for business and industry customers. Business Online Solutions was responsible for consolidating customer facing services from 13 Queensland Government agencies into a single location.
By radically changing business processes, the department delivered: efficiencies by migrating services from high cost channels to low cost; and increased productivity through efficient consolidated and consistent processes. This resulted in 494 additional services of varying complexity, almost 3.5 million unique visitors and reduced customer phone calls through channel shift.
Sandra Pieper researched, developed and implemented the Caboolture Integrated Case Management Project for serious young offenders, an intensive family and community based intervention program that addresses individual and environmental elements that impact juvenile offending.
The primary objectives of this program are to address multiple determinants of serious anti-social behaviour to reduce rates of criminal offending in recidivist juvenile offenders; promote pro-social engagement in educational and vocational pathways; enhance family functioning; reduce substance misuse; and reduce out of home placements.
This overall award is presented to the Queensland Police Service teams involved with the 2014 G20, for their outstanding achievements in the leadership, planning and delivery of this major security operation.
