Enhancing Situational Awareness: Supporting Operational Decision Making Across WA Country Health Service

Opportunity

WA Country Health Service delivers healthcare across one of the world’s largest geographically dispersed health service catchments. Supporting safe, timely, and equitable care across regional, rural, and remote communities requires effective operational visibility, efficient coordination, and proactive decision-making across a diverse range of services and operational environments.

As operational complexity continues to evolve across healthcare environments, there is an opportunity to further strengthen shared awareness of service pressures, emerging operational risks, and system-wide impacts across geographically dispersed services.

This project explores how situational awareness principles and approaches may support operational decision-making within WA Country Health Service. The work considers how information, operational indicators, communication pathways, governance processes, and decision-support practices contribute to the awareness of current conditions, emerging pressures, and future operational considerations.

The project also examines how existing operational systems, data sets, dashboards, and information flows complement one another to support coordinated and evidence-informed operational awareness.

The project includes:

• a review of situational awareness approaches used within healthcare and other operational environments
• exploration of operational information flows and decision-support practices across WA Country Health Service
• examination of how operational indicators and information are currently used to support awareness and coordination
• and identification of opportunities to support operational visibility, shared awareness, and informed decision-making across geographically dispersed services.
• development of a scalable Situational Awareness Framework to support shared operational awareness, coordination, and informed decision-making across WA Country Health Service operational contexts.

Project Objectives

This project aims to support the development of enhanced situational awareness capabilities within regional and remote health services by improving the quality, integration, and operational use of data. To:

• explore operational indicators, information requirements, and decision-support approaches that contribute to situational awareness across healthcare operations;
• examine how operational information is communicated, interpreted, and used to support awareness of current and emerging service pressures
• better understand how existing systems, dashboards, and operational processes support visibility of operational conditions across services
• identify opportunities to strengthen shared operational awareness, coordination, and information use across geographically dispersed health services
• support understanding of organisational capability and operational practices relating to situational awareness and operational coordination
• explore how real-time and emerging operational indicators may assist awareness of service delivery pressures, patient access considerations, and operational continuity across WA Country Health Service.

Together, this work aims to strengthen WA Country Health Service’s ability to anticipate, understand and respond to operational challenges, ultimately supporting safe, coordinated, and effective healthcare delivery across regional and remote Western Australia.