Heart of Australia has a bold mission: to ensure Queenslanders have access to the medical specialist services they need, where they need them. We work tirelessly on our mission by delivering specialist medical investigation and treatment clinics to regional, rural and remote area communities. After many months of quiet, behind-the-scenes planning, designing and building, Heart of Australia has moved into its new home at 109 Honour Avenue, Chelmer.
The coordination and management involved in making it happen on a day to day basis are complex, combining the challenges of running a modern specialist medical clinic, with a trucking logistics company and a touring troop of specialists you need to feed and house each day.
To pull it off successfully you need a team of people who are driven by the big picture of the mission, but who are highly skilled in their area of expertise, and who have excellent attention to detail. On any given day, our teams are speaking to manufacturers and trucking firms regarding vehicle and systems maintenance and future builds, talking with local GPs regarding referrals, liaising with the admin staff of our specialists regarding priority patients, flights to site and more, and of course, speaking with patients to book their appointments and help ease any anxiety they have about attending the truck for the first time.
As the number of towns and the number of heart trucks has grown, so have the logistical challenges. To date, we have been juggling operation management from several sites, but we have now found our (hopefully) forever home in Chelmer in a for-purpose renovated Queenslander.
Our new HQ now acts as the central control hub for all our operations. We manage all our activities, liaise with our specialists, communities and local GPs and perform all the booking coordination for patients for all our heart trucks across all our towns.
Our headquarters are co-located with Dr Gomes’ private practice – MediHearts, which is located on the ground floor. This co-location is an invaluable step forward for Heart of Australia. While Dr Gomes was sad to forego his dual location practice (Taringa and Ipswich), the dramatic reduction in travelling times means both Heart of Australia and MediHearts have greater access to his time. As we have as yet, been unable to clone him, this is the next best thing.
The building itself is beautiful and provides a calm and supportive working space for our hard-working and dedicated administration and operations team. While their work is often behind-the-scenes compared to the work of our dedicated mobile heart truck teams, their roles are just as vital in our efforts to save lives and deliver health equity to people in regional Queensland.
