BUSHkids Annual Report 2015-16

CEO

Chief Executive Officer This report comes to you at the end of my fifth and final year as General Manager and first year as CEO of BUSHkids, as our organisation’s 80th anniversary celebrations come to a close. I am proud that from strong foundations we are continuing to build and evolve as an organisation to continue to meet the needs of children and families living in regional, rural and remote areas of Queensland. The work that BUSHkids does remains in clear focus and there are five core areas of achievement in the past year on which we can reflect. First, our 80th anniversary celebrations provided a rare opportunity for us to rediscover the full extent of our history and this reconnection has culminated in the production of a comprehensive history book, the result of huge amounts of effort , time and goodwill by volunteers, BUSHkids Council, current and former staff members and clients and the wider community. Second, 2015/16 was a year when BUSHkids made great strides in realising more strategic plans in our approaches to building community capacity to meet the needs of children in rural, regional and remote areas of Queensland. Third, our organisation is looking to the future with the commencement of a research project to create a telehealth framework for BUSHkids. The fourth highlight has been reinvigorating and consolidating community connections through our growing numbers of volunteers and the members of our Friends of BUSHkids committees. Finally, as we continue to serve the community as we have done for the last 80 years, we have taken the opportunity to reflect on our progress against our Strategic Plan and have undertaken work to continue to improve our performance by more accurately measuring productivity, reviewing our salary structure and streamlining reporting. History book As the Chairman has noted, our magnificent hardback book BUSHIES : Stories from the first 80 years of BUSHkids – the Royal Queensland Bush Children’s Health Scheme will be officially launched on our 81st birthday on 6 December 2016. This book records some of the stories, memories and recollections of the more than 42,000 children and families our organisation has supported for more than three generations, along with meaningful and lively insights from many staff members past and present. Rich in detail and lavishly illustrated with many unique or rare images, this monumental work captures a vital piece of Queensland’s social history and celebrates the achievements of its people and their Outback communities — and the living legacy of our founder, Sir Leslie Orme Wilson.

Almost three years in the making (research work by Adrian Harrison and Matt Tesch began in early 2014 using Pat Carlin’s 2010 booklet as an essential guide), BUSHIES is the product of many thousands of hours of almost entirely-voluntary commitment. More than 8,000 images and documents in our archives were appraised, sorted and sifted; more than 2,000 of these were carefully digitised to preserve fragmenting newspaper cuttings, scratchy recordings and fading photographic emulsion for future generations. More than 800 of these incredible pictures ultimately found their way into the 448 pages of the book which, for the first time, fully illuminates the inspiring vision of our founders in the 1930s and the courageous efforts of succeeding generations of BUSHkids staff and management in transforming and evolving our organisation to ensure it continues to meet very different family and community needs to those which were first confronted more than 80 years ago. Building the capacity of rural, remote and regional communities During the 2015-16 year BUSHkids aimed to further develop services in line with our service model, to support all children in our regions to achieve their potential. This is approached through a range of strategies with the intent of reducing the number of children requiring clinical intervention in the future by implementing early interevention, prevention and health promotion strategies. We aim to build local communities’ capacity to support the developmental needs of children. This is achieved by providing education and training for parents and early childhood workers. We also provide targeted group programs in settings where needs have been identified. These include evidence-based and evidence-informed programs which address particular skill development (such as social skills, parenting, and communication) and the introduction of BUSHkids playgroups. Initiatives such as these complement our core multidisciplinary clinical intervention services of Speech-Language Pathology, Occupational Therapy and Psychology in our service regions. This extension of our focus is beginning to become evident in our session statistics. We are reaching more children and this is reflected in an increase in targeted group programs being provided. In the previous year we provided 1,347 group program sessions; this increased by more than 53% to 2,067 sessions in 2015-16. The change is particularly evident in the work we are doing in our outreach towns. Previously only 35% of sessions in outreach locations were group sessions. In 2015-16 the number of individual sessions provided on outreach remained fairly steady (310, compared with 335 the year before), however group sessions provided on outreach increased by 83%, from 178 to 326, representing more than half of all outreach sessions provided. Previously our community education sessions were provided on an ad hoc basis. Now that we are strategically focused in this area, we are able to report 212 community education sessions were held throughout Queensland in 2015-16. Moving services from a purely clinical intervention approach to utilising the full range of strategies – including preventive and educational – has required resources to be prioritised to support this change.

Carlton Meyn

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