News

New safety glasses

Safety glasses act as a physical protective barrier between your eyes and the objects and substances that can cause you harm. Ordinary eyewear, in the form of prescription glasses and contact lenses, is not designed specifically to meet the safety standards needed to adequately protect you against injury. Currently, many staff wear safety glasses over spectacles with their prescription lenses. QAS has introduced an alternative option, Bolle IRI-S Dioptre, which allow staff who normally use glasses for reading/close up work to wear safety glasses with in-built correction for their reading/close work.

Features:

available in clear and smoke lens provides five reading area dioptre versions from +1.0 to +3.0 ultra-lightweight frame

B-Flex nose bridge which is fully adjustable in height, depth and width tilt adjustable temple arms for a customised and secure fit. These are available to staff through their OIC via the QAS PPE catalogue.

LARU graduate certificate

The LARU program’s Graduate Certificate in Enhanced Assessment and Critical Reasoning (Queensland Ambulance Service) launched in July. The Graduate Certificate course is being offered to paramedics currently working in the LARU environment, providing those officers with an opportunity to upgrade their qualifications to the Graduate Certificate level, recognising their previous skills and experience. It will also be offered as a pilot program to those paramedics who wish to augment their current knowledge and skills; or diversify into a LARU position as a future career choice; or those officers working in rural and remote communities where these skills will be of benefit. This is the first time a vocational education program such as this has been developed in Australia.

The LARU program was initiated after the QAS identified that it was responding to an increasing number of patients who presented with conditions which were complex, but non-critical. In response, QAS developed an alternative service delivery model for this patient cohort, which is known as the Local area Assessment and Referral Unit, or LARU. The pilot LARU model kicked off in Metro North in August 2014. Since that time, the successful pilot has been expanded across the state, and it is now located in 17 locations in the Metro North, Metro South, Gold Coast, West Moreton, Cairns, Townsville, Sunshine Coast, Darling Downs and Mackay LASNs.

The QAS has 68 permanent LARU paramedics appointed across the state and they have responded to almost 270,000 incidents since the program commenced in August 2014, providing treatment at home, or transporting or referring the patient into the broader health networks of Queensland. As the LARU model expanded, QAS has reviewed the knowledge and skills required to ensure they were meeting the needs of this patient cohort, providing LARU paramedics with increased treatment and assessment skills. In 2019, QAS revised the LARU education program which has been accredited by the Australian Skills Quality Authority at the postgraduate certificate level.