I have been so lucky to be involved with St John for over 10years, first as a Board Director NSW, then Chair, NSW and a Director of the national organisation and finally as CEO, NSW from 2017 to 2023.
My role as CEO of St John encompassed organisation wide culture change, Emergency Response in Fires, Floods and COVID-19, significant stakeholder management from grass roots to Government Ministers, building new revenue lines and realigning our organisation to ensure customer centric, digitally enhanced services.
Our culture change program saw an increase of 45% in overall engagement and allowed us to better navigate a complex governance structure to align the volunteer and commercial parts of our organisation and support grass roots volunteer leadership, training and development. This made it easier to volunteer, made our programs more relevant and changed our volunteer demographic profile (70% under the age of 30).
Our emergency response throughout the devastating 2019/20 fires and 2021 floods, developed interagency trust and engagement, and built respect in St Johns capabilities to provide medical centres at base camps and evacuation centres providing both first aid and mental health support.
This led to negotiated grant funding throughout the COVID-19 pandemic to help bridge the healthcare gap in quarantine hotels, vaccination centres, outreach to vulnerable and online support to remote and regional areas. In 2021 St John recruited, onboarded and trained over 1200 individuals to meet this need.
Our traditional face to face education program was decimated by the pandemic, so we transformed not just the learning channel to online but the student experience itself. Our programs now provide students with an end to end streamlined, consistent and engaging learning experience with multimedia content and smartphone technology.
We continued to provide first aid and medical services to over 5,000 events across NSW each year, leveraging our volunteer footprint across 70 divisions, mitigating event risk and reducing the impact on the local health system. Our revenue building success in other areas of our business allowed us in 2022 to reinvest $3m into assets to enhance our Event Health and Emergency Services work.
What gave me the greatest joy throughout my time at St John was the opportunity to work with extraordinary people through some of the most challenging times we will ever experience. I loved every minute of it because we did it together, as a team, balancing commercial outcomes with community impact.
Our role as custodians of St John is to leave it in a better place than when we started. I hope that I have done that for St John.
St John Ambulance Australia acknowledges the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples and communities on the Traditional Lands on which we work Australia wide. We acknowledge the Ngunnawal and Ngambri peoples, the Traditional Custodians of the Canberra region, where our Australian Office is based. We pay our respects to elders past and present. At St John Ambulance, we are an inclusive organisation. We welcome and respect people that come from all backgrounds, cultures, religions, genders, sexualities, bodies, and abilities. Access to First Aid and its knowledge are fundamental human rights. Every person deserves access to life saving support, no matter who they are.
St John Ambulance Australia’s nationally recognised accredited courses are delivered by way of third-party arrangement with other organisations (for example, with our St John States and Territories). These St John states and territories (except WA) are authorised to deliver nationally recognised and accredited training on behalf of St John Ambulance Australia Ltd (RTO 88041).
St John Ambulance Australia acknowledges the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples and communities on the Traditional Lands on which we work Australia wide. We acknowledge the Ngunnawal and Ngambri peoples, the Traditional Custodians of the Canberra region, where our Australian Office is based. We pay our respects to elders past and present. At St John Ambulance, we are an inclusive organisation. We welcome and respect people that come from all backgrounds, cultures, religions, genders, sexualities, bodies, and abilities. Access to First Aid and its knowledge are fundamental human rights. Every person deserves access to life saving support, no matter who they are.
St John Ambulance Australia’s nationally recognised accredited courses are delivered by way of third-party arrangement with other organisations (for example, with our St John State and Territory agents). These agents (except WA) are authorised to deliver nationally recognised and accredited training on behalf of St John Ambulance Australia Ltd (RTO 88041).
