Ambulance Victoria has moved to better manage its Occupational Health & Safety (OHS) incident and hazards, WorkCover claims and peer co-ordination activities with the assessment of a new Information Management System (IMS).
If adopted, the IMS would allow all 4200 Ambulance Victoria employees to log incidents and hazards for appropriate escalation to the organisation’s Health Safety and Wellbeing (HSW) department.
The system would also allow the HSW department to perform early intervention andinjury management, claims management and peer co-ordination activities.
Having an IMS would also allow Ambulance Victoria to centralise and automate AV’s hazard, injury and incident notification, consist of a corresponding risk assessment and Work Cover claims management, and allow flexible data extraction for internal and external stakeholders.
The IMS would also be integrated with standard Microsoft Office applications for the generation of letters, export of data, interface with emails and a calendar.
Integration would also occur with Ambulance Victoria’s HR and payroll systems and data, Pager systems for the immediate escalation of incidents, Oracle-based data warehouse, network of mobile devices and the organisation’s online database.
The news follows reports from ambulance staff at Ambulance Victoria and other state agencies that the roll out of an electronic Patient Care Record (ePCR) is causing major problems.
Paramedics using the system say records in the ePCR system take up to an hour to fill out, or four times longer than with pen and paper, and claim it produces lax reports that do not adequately describe a patient’s condition.
They also claim doctors have been left stranded when overburden paramedics have dumped patients at hospitals without ePCRs.