Warrigal’s Property Team was awarded the ‘Transformation and Reinvention’ Award at the Community Industry Group’s “We Do Magic” Gala dinner event last Friday night.

The award, recognising Warrigal’s Safe Visiting Areas initiative, was presented in North Wollongong where over 250 people representing community service organisations were in attendance.

Warrigal CEO, Mark Sewell, said winning the award was a thrilling accolade for Warrigal.

“This achievement recognises the great work that was done across the organisation by providing a clever solution with the implementation of our Safe Visiting Areas, enabling our families and residents to safely keep visiting to remain connected and supported at the height of the COVID-19 pandemic in 2020.”
The Safe Visiting Areas are designated areas at each home that has a separate entrance for residents and for families. Made of timber, Perspex and glass so families were able to safely visit their loved ones with no risk of infection across the see-through physical barrier in place, each side is also fully equipped with seating and microphones.
Mark reserved special praise for the winning project, calling it ‘game-changing’.

“Our Safe Visiting Areas at Warrigal have been so successful they are now considered a key safety feature in innovative aged care building design in Australia and are included in Warrigal’s New Communities Design Standard for the future as we are likely to have to manage infectious risk for many years to come.” he said.
In other honours for the evening, Warrigal was also named finalist in the below categories, delivering on its vision of making older people’s lives great:

• “Above & Beyond — Individual”, Colin Baker, Contracts Manager. Recognising his work on the effective management of Warrigal’s Personal Protective Equipment (PPE) stockpile when stocks were in short supply, which helped ensure staff, residents and customers were safe from the devastating Coronavirus outbreak.
• “Above & Beyond — Team”, Warrigal’s Recruitment Team for creating Warrigal’s temporary surge workforce of over 100 additional staff ensuring continuity of care was available to Warrigal’s residents in preparation for a COVID-19 outbreak.
• “Transformation & Reinvention”, Warrigal’s Information Services Team for implementing many technological environments to enable staff to work from home as well as supplying computer and communication devices to many older people so they remained connected to their families and the doctors in 2020.

• “A Brilliant Idea” , Warrigal’s Property Team for the urgent creation of a Special Care Unit, designed to isolate any customers from Warrigal’s care homes, home services or villages with COVID-19 who were unable to go to the hospital but needed to be isolated and receive isolation and additional levels of special care.

Mark said Warrigal is proud to use the awards to highlight the great work being done in the aged care sector by the 1500 staff and over 350 volunteers at Warrigal who have worked magnificently together to achieve this recognition even in the midst of a devastating global pandemic.

“It is such a great honour to receive such accolades, especially given the other nominees who were some very impressive individuals and organisations from across Southern NSW.”

“This award is really one to be celebrated by our staff, volunteers and our customers and residents — who all want to achieve the same goal — older people in our region having great lives as they get older. That’s something which deserves to be celebrated”, Mark said.