Strong results delivered in St John 2016/17 annual report

St John Ambulance WA’s 2016/17 annual report highlights the efforts of more than 10,600 Western Australians who help make WA a safer, more resilient community.

St John Ambulance Chief Executive Officer Tony Ahern said the report, released today, showcased some outstanding results for St John.

He said the results included achieving the majority of its ambulance response time targets and training more than 386,000 Western Australians.

“The totality of all our efforts during the year saw us interact with almost one million patients or first aid students – a fantastic effort, made possible by our 1,518 staff and our 9,140 volunteers,” Mr Ahern said.

“Our integrated service delivers great value and service for the community of Western Australia and we are immensely proud of this fact.”

There were more than 300,000 ambulance cases in WA in the year ending June 30, up from 289,085 in 2015/16, a rise of four per cent.

The State Operations Centre, which handles all triple zero ambulance calls (000), received 574,479 calls in 2016/17, up from 552,275 in 2015/16.

Our Patient Transfer Service, which provides all non-urgent medical transport, continued to regularly exceed performance targets and we experienced very strong growth in community transport.

“Our move into primary health and urgent care, which was launched with the purchase of Apollo Health in June 2016, was also successful with 269,537 people visiting one of our GP or urgent care services,” Mr Ahern said.

St John ended the financial year with a surplus of $17.4 million, down from $20.2 million in 2015/16.

“The surplus continues a trend over several years of sound financial management,” Mr Ahern said.

“It allows us to fund the 2017/18 capital works program and the investment in our charitable activities such as free first aid programs for Western Australian school children.”

Major capital works programs completed in 2016/17 included construction of a new Central Hub in Belmont and a new ambulance depot in Kelmscott.

The annual report can be downloaded here.