Our health care system is basically on a two tier, it's a clinical system and an education one. The clinical environment of Family Planning globally is all about doctors and nurses doing cervical screening breast examinations, breast referrals. Not that we do breast examinations much, it’s more about breast awareness and educating women. We do contraception, we do pregnancy supports and assisting women in decisions. We also do a lot of menopause. And for the men we do a lot of health checks for the prostate and their testes checks and STI's, Sexually transmitted infections (STI’s) is a big part of our clinical service.
The other side of it has an education focus. We have a separate lot of staff and the education involves delivering professional courses to professional health groups such as doctors, nurses, health workers, pharmacists, and social workers. We have given a lot of workshops to different groups and then we also have health promotion in a community that provide to the disability sector, the school sector, the school's students. Some schools will still get us in to talk to students and do various workshops with them and other schools we might just see their teachers to give them information and get them to do the educating themselves.
Our healthcare system at Cancer Council NT is first of all structured in we have a CEO and we have multiple different sections at Cancer Council NT We have a fundraising section, who obviously raise funds for us to provide support services. We have the administration and ostomy section, ostomy being we supply all the ostomy supplies for everyone in the Northern Territory.
We have a support services section which encompasses two-and-a-half registered nurses, and three information and support officers. We are based in Darwin, Katherine and Alice Springs, kind of spread out across those locations and we provide the support emotionally and practically to clients. Then we have health promotion section as well, which is covered by another staff member.
Our services are structured at this point-in-time as teams, so we have our Board and our CEO, and then we have a Management Team
Each of the services we offer also have a team of them of their own, and they all have Team Leaders and then they have support workers or key workers that are actually working on the ground with people and to support them in their mental health.
At Cancer Council NT, our services are structured in a way that best reduces the impact of cancer on Territorians. So that's done through two different ways at our organisation: through both our support services, actually working with our clients who have been faced with a cancer diagnosis and their families. As well as through prevention and they are the two main tiers of our service.
Like most services running community we have funding that comes from a body where we will have objectives to meet under that funding criteria. That really does direct what level of services you can provide
Within that you also then do a bit of a needs analysis of your of the community, and what you're actually trying to achieve with it. Your services are then usually benchmarked and delivered around what are your KPI's (key performance indicators) and what are you trying to achieve.
We’ve been doing the services here for quite a few years and they have evolved over time depending on what the community's needs are and how things have changed over time.
The Heart Foundation has been around for 60 years in Australia We're currently operating under the For All Hearts Strategy until the end of 2017.
This strategy covers four key focus areas which is: Healthy Hearts, healthy hearts looks at tobacco, reduction in tobacco use in Australia; it looks at overweight and obesity, food and nutrition as well as physical activity as important parts of prevention.
We have our second pillar which is Heart Care which looks at the clinical space or the tertiary space and we're looking at things like acute coronary syndrome things like absolute cardiovascular risk as well as warning signs of heart attack.
Our third area is equity so ensuring our culturally/ linguistically diverse Aboriginal Torres Strait Islander populations, as well as our rural and remote populations are considered in all the work that we do at the Heart Foundation.
We’ve also got our fourth pillar which is research. The Heart Foundation has around and funds around 13 million dollars’ worth of research every year.
In this health system we have mainly nurses who are educators as well as working in the
clinics so they have to be multi-skilled. We have nurse's with qualifications, they don't have to be teachers we actually give them that skill base. If they had come along as a nurse and they are qualified in having completed some of our courses then we will give them the support and the training they need to become educators of their peers. So we do like nurses and we do like health workers. We've had health workers previously working within the organization. We've got doctors and we have medical students, nursing students and otherwise it's all of an administration/receptionist skill base as the other group of workers
We also have a Board of Volunteers. Family Planning work with the Board so they are the ones that govern us. I'm responsible for management, but basically the Board will govern and set the policy and the course direction and the priorities and the strategic direction of the organization. The Board are complete volunteers in this organisation, so we do rely on a lot of ask for help for free.
The great thing with our organization is we have a huge variety of team members. We have people from all kinds of educational backgrounds and we have Occupational Therapists, we have people who have done psychology, we have people who've done teaching, nursing, a huge variety of people which bring a really vast skill set as well and different backgrounds.
I think when you're working with people with potential mental illness, for supporting people in their mental health it's great to have that variety of skills and backgrounds so you can relate to a broader population.
We have a CEO, we have two fundraising officers, we have one administration officer, multiple volunteers and one ostomy support officer, three cancer information and support officers, two registered nurses and one casual registered nurse and one cancer prevention coordinator.
Health professional wise we employ diabetes educators, cardiac educators, dieticians and health promotion officers, which often have like our current Health Promotion Manager a background in physical activity education.
Within our service we have a Cardiovascular Health Director and that person looks after all the cardiovascular health in the Northern Territory
Under that we have a Healthy Hearts Manager as well as a Heart Care Manager and that’s primarily focussed in Health for the Heart Foundation here in the Northern Territory