WA

WA BRANCH REPORT

The Western Australian Branch celebrated the opening of 2020 with a successful professional development meeting at St John of God Hospital in Midland. At the same time on the far horizon the threat of the COVID-19 virus was beginning to make itself known. By the beginning of March it was having an impact in Western Australia.

The March branch meeting hosted by Western Power’s Mr John Righetti had to be scaled back to accommodate the emerging COVID-19 restrictions. The original agenda included a site visit the Western Power State Control Centre, sadly this had to be abandoned at the last minute to protect these essential workers from potential infection.

Nevertheless, our attending members were thoroughly enthralled with the delivery of two excellent presentations. The first was a reflective overview of a bush fire event that threatened Perth’s power supply network in January 2020. The presenter Mr Malcolm (Mal) Basketter (Network Control team Leader) lead us step-by-step on how Western Power manage network emergencies. From being aware of threats, how they responded, and in greater detail how they managed a number of critical power network events in recent history (bushfire, generation failures, storms) – so as to maintain power supply to customers across the South West Interconnected Network (SWIN) of Western Australia. The members responded with a deluge of questions and discussions that could have easily consumed the rest of our meeting time.

In addition to value of the first session, our members were privileged to be the audience of Western Power strategic development and planning team’s Ms Mel Mercer Royce (Senior Strategy Analyst) & Richard Barnett (Senior Planning Engineer / Grid Solution) who shared Western Power’s future directions and plans to meet Perth’s growing power requirements. We were shown an informative presentation of Perth’s power demands and how Western Power intends on meeting the future, with network supported micro grids that supplement with solar power and battery banks.

Meeting chair and State Secretary Mr Andrew Waugh thanked Mr John Righetti and his team for such an informative and entertaining evening by presenting them with a bottle of Hand Sanitiser (at the time more valuable than gold). Thank you to Andrew for arranging this excellent meeting.

During general business State Vice President Mr Fred Foley presented member Mr Len Mumme with his 10 year certificate. During Len’s response, he enlightened us with his observations on when he joined the IHEA and how the IHEA WA has grown into the professional body it is today without losing its personal touch.

As the COVID-19 restrictions tightened in Western Australia it was clear that it was no longer possible to hold safe

branch meetings, resulting in the WA Committee deciding to suspend all branch meetings until it was considered safe to resume.

To continue with our Professional Development strategy the State Committee set out to hold branch meetings via the digital media ZOOM®. This posed the challenge; how do you teach the more senior members how to use digital media? The answer – “solicit the assistance of the younger members of your family!”.

Past State President Mr Greg Truscott has taken on the portfolio of “Digital DJ”.

May, saw 17 members attend our first ZOOM branch meeting. The meeting was chaired by Mr Greg Truscott and hosted by Mr Alex Rodgers, Norman, Disney and Young’s Group Health Director. Alex presented an informative insight into COVID-19 titled “COVID-19 Engineering Preparedness and Myth Busting”.

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Alex’s professionally researched delivery was informative, triggered questions and prompted open discussion around how Healthcare Facility Managers deal with the growing demand of containing the COVID-19 virus in a Healthcare environment. The presentation offered professional opinions from the world’s FM and Heath consortiums to bust some of the COVID-19 misinformation that Healthcare Facility Managers are faced with. The presentation contains many valuable reference links and is available for members on request.

The meeting provided an opportunity for members to share their experiences and challenges they faced preparing for and managing COVID-19 – from the short notice to stand up a COVID Clinic, to the Just-in-Time adaptation of patient rooms to achieve negative pressures for building pandemic patient capacity ahead of the curve.

For our first digital branch meeting, it has deemed to be a great success. Thanks to Mr Alex Rodgers who set the presenters bar high, to Mr Greg Truscott (aptly support by his son James) for tying this all together and not forgetting Executive Assistant Ms Sarah Trinidad who supported Alex.

June 4th at 7:30pm saw our second ZOOM branch meeting with Mr Neil Armstrong from CHUBB providing a professional development session on infra-red thermal camera technology, and the latest applications including body thermal measurement (with live demonstration) providing healthcare facilities with further tools to assist in managing our current issues.

July will see our annual State Special Meeting. We are looking to holding our first face to face meeting since the lockdown in March 2021. Nominations are called for all IHEA WA Committee of Management positions.

Fred Foley – WA State Vice President