A huge congratulations to Samantha Beder, Senior Physiotherapist, who is our STAR Award winner for Excellence in Occupational Health and Safety.
The award is given to a person or team who develop innovative ways to improve the quality of healthcare and service delivery. This includes identifying and eliminating risks in the workplace, supporting employees to report issues and then taking action to “fix” the issue, and putting in place employee wellbeing activities and tools that support improved mental health and psychological safety.
Samantha was nominated for her patience, respect and diligence in her efforts to enable safe access for paedatric patients to the Hydrotherapy pool at Kingston Centre.
Hydrotherapy, or aquatic physiotherapy, is an ideal option for those who are going through injury rehabilitation or those with long-standing injuries.
To facilitate Paediatric patients attending the Kingston site pool, significant changes were needed to the Hydrotherapy procedures.
Samantha engaged with a wide range of stakeholders including the Paediatric deteriorating patient committee, Kingston site management, medical teams, paediatric and community clinicians.
Samantha’s persistence throughout the Code Brown period in 2021 and 2022 led to the successful outcome of the pool opening to paediatric patients.
“It feels very humbling to receive this award and am grateful for the recognition of lots of hard work that went into this procedure. As a passionate aquatic physiotherapist, it’s lovely to have the service recognised. Aquatic Physiotherapy is such as incredibly important treatment method, as it provide ours patients with opportunities to stand and walk, often the first time post injury. It’s great that we have been able to also extend these opportunities to the paediatric population and have more equitable care.
“This was a massive body of work that involved input from many key people. I would especially like to thank my manager Jackie Turner for her continued support and efforts to help get this procedure off the ground. I also would like to acknowledge the paediatric physiotherapists and nursing teams who have upskilled in paediatric code blue management and provided support to this procedure so we could get the kiddies in the pool at Kingston.”
If you would like to nominate a colleague or team, you can do so at any time by visiting the STAR Awards portal. For more information about the STAR Awards program, Monash Health Employee Recognition Program page.
Approved by Chris McLoughlin (Executive Director People and Culture)