Renaud Mazy: Things can go wrong, but patient care is always the goal

Sixty days into my tenure as the newly appointed CEO of Joondalup Health Campus, I am conscious that we have featured in the news recently — and not for the reasons we would customarily want.

Having been CEO of one of Newsweek’s World’s Best 200 hospitals, Saint-Luc University Hospital, in my native Belgium for 13 years, I am acutely aware of the fact that hospitals are environments where highly trained and hugely dedicated healthcare professionals do their very best to help and treat all who present to them.

This is the nature of healthcare and the very reason so many people choose to make it their career.

I came to work in hospitals in the same way, like my wife who is a general practitioner, with a deep desire to care for people.

Like the 732-bed Joondalup Health Campus, University Hospital Saint Luc is a large and highly efficient hospital with 1000 beds and more than 6000 staff. It has also received news coverage.

I was CEO of the hospital in March 2016 when Islamic State coordinated two terrorist attacks — one, a suicide bomber at Brussels Airport, and another a detonated bomb on a train leaving Brussels metro station. Thirty-two people were killed and 300 were injured in the attacks. I led our crisis team through the arduous ordeal.

Then, in February 2020, another huge health challenge erupted: COVID-19. One person among a group of nine Belgians repatriated from Wuhan, China, tested positive for the coronavirus, eventually resulting in almost 5 million confirmed cases and 34,000 deaths in Belgium alone.

That crisis ran for more than 12 months and as an avid runner, I likened it to running a marathon every day for more than a year.

If there is one thing that I learned during that period, it is the incredible capacity of humans to help each other.

Not only nurses, doctors and allied health staff, but also general administrative staff, who chipped in and risked their own health to help complete strangers. It made me realise that people are fundamentally good; selfless, generous and kind.

Which brings me to our own news coverage over the past few weeks.

The staff who work at Joondalup Health Campus are similarly selfless, generous and kind. They are 4062 of the best people you could ever want to meet.

The provision of healthcare can be difficult in complex presentations. The wish of every health practitioner is a positive outcome for their patients.

As a health care provider, we are constantly evaluating and reviewing the care and communication we provide to our patients so that we can continually improve. We align with government-run public hospitals across performance measurements.

What I can say, and with absolute authority, is that Joondalup Health Campus strives to provide all of the more than 68,000 inpatients we treat annually with the highest quality of care and compassion.

We understand that the whole experience and perception of our patients, their families and carers is important, not just the health care we provide.

I have said to our engaged and committed team that the question we should always be asking is; “how well have we addressed the question that the patient asked?”

Addressing that question is essential to ensuring we can continue the job of helping people care for people.

Renaud Mazy is the chief executive of the Joondalup Health Campus.