Chief Executive Officer’s Report

CHIEF EXECUTIVE OFFICER LINDSEY WEBBER In the midst of a year when we stared down a global pandemic, as an organisation we chose to take time to stop, pause and think about our ‘why?’

We all have a purpose, cause or belief that drives us, and it was pleasing to see that collectively we acknowledge the PHO’s common purpose is to see the improved health and wellbeing of our communities. It’s what brings us together and keeps us going.

Haere mai, welcome to our 2019-2020 Annual Report.

We speak not only about health, but also wellbeing because they go hand-in-hand – there is no health without the things that keep us well, such as safe environments, employment, education, housing and social connectedness.

Our health is not just our physical health either – it is also our mental health, our spiritual health and our whānau/family health. This is why we embrace the Whare Tapa Whā model of health and have incorporated its principles into our new Health Strategy Te Toi Huarewa.

We have taken a strong equity approach in this strategy, particularly for Māori, and will seek to understand what matters to whānau and bring them on board to design services that work for them.

Investment in clinical, cultural and health intelligence leadership has strengthened our ability to support our network to understand and address inequities, to encourage co-design of services, to be brave and innovative, to challenge outdated ideas and to celebrate new ways of thinking.

Our community’s health and wellbeing has certainly been challenged this year by COVID-19. It has been tough, and a real test of our agility, responsiveness, and resilience.

General Practice met the challenge of changing its service delivery model and embracing telehealth head on. Thank you to our amazing GP teams for coming together, for stepping up and for making us proud.

Our Iwi partners, Ngāi Te Rangi and Ngāti Ranginui, also had to change their service delivery model and embrace new technologies, showing great flexibility and innovation to keep their communities safe. Our special thanks to them for improving the health and wellbeing experience for Māori, by Māori.

The partnership approach to the mahi to establish the Port of Tauranga surveillance testing programme in particular, led by Ngāti Ranginui and supported by our Clinical, IT and Finance teams, the Bay of Plenty DHB, Pathlab and Port of Tauranga, is a good example of unity across multiple stakeholders and something of which we can all be truly proud.

These strengthened relationships with our partners, and a new chief executive at the helm of the DHB, bring new opportunities for realising the aspirations for a wholeof-system approach outside of the traditional hospital campus.

And while we rightly had to focus on our COVID-19 response this year, we did not let our key mahi slip and, in fact, had some significant wins.

Our enrolled population continued to grow, with almost 6000 additional people enrolling with one of our General Practices in 2019-2020. Importantly, our number of Māori enrolments continued to grow also and exceeded the growth in our total population.

Brief advice was given to 16,043 smokers in the past 15 months and 14 percent of those were referred to supportto-quit programmes. This bodes well for our objective of reducing patient deaths from the effects of long-term smoking and chronic obstructive pulmonary disease.

We have enjoyed great success with the timely vaccination of eight-month-olds due their childhood immunisations. For the year ending 30 June 2020, we immunised 559 of 657 eligible Māori children.

At the other end of the age spectrum, we gave more than 4600 additional flu vaccinations to our over 65s this year. Of note was an increase in the number of Māori over 65s receiving a vaccination from 55 percent to 71 percent.

We have also come ahead leaps and bounds in our health intelligence space this year – bringing meaning to our reporting capability and knowing where we need to focus our efforts to improve health outcomes through good quality data and analysis.

Our finance capability has also been brought in-house this year, which will give us greater visibility over our financial performance, customer service and business processes.

To summarise our performance as a team this year, there is no doubt we have been adaptive, responsive and innovative in our thinking. We have stepped up and stepped out of our comfort zones and have remained focussed on doing the right thing.

But perhaps the thing that has stood out the most for me this year is our growing sense of whanaungatanga and connectedness as an organisation and network. Thank you all for staying on the waka and taking this journey together.

Nāku noa, nā,

LINDSEY WEBBER “Investment in clinical, cultural and health intelligence leadership has strengthened our ability to support our network to understand and address inequities, to encourage codesign of services, to be brave and innovative, to challenge outdated ideas and to celebrate new ways of thinking.”