Our role in the community
Located in Queenstown, Southern Cross Central Lakes Hospital provides patients in the Central Lakes region with greater access to quality elective surgery closer to home.
While a private hospital, services will be provided to both privately and publicly funded patients to support broader access to healthcare in the region. While accident and emergency services are not part of the service we offer, we will be providing planned care for patients who are eligible through ACC.
A partnership between Southern Cross Healthcare and Central Lakes Trust
Our name Southern Cross Central Lakes Hospital is an expression of the joint venture partnership between Central Lakes Trust and Southern Cross Healthcare.
Together, our purpose is to support the health and wellbeing of the Central Lakes community.
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New hospital opens in Whakatipu
A new independent hospital for the Central Lakes region, the Southern Cross Central Lakes Hospital, was formally opened on Friday 10 December 2021, offering the local community more convenient access to elective surgical services.
Hospital on home stretch
The first operations at Queenstown’s new surgical hospital will be performed in January. The Southern Cross CLT independent hospital, understood to cost about $25million, is nearing completion and is expected to be handed over by developer Queenstown Commercial by Christmas.
New Queenstown hospital set to open by end of year
Queenstown's new independent hospital is scheduled to open by the end of this year, and is expected to start operating in January. Southern Cross CLT Ltd chairman Terry Moore said despite the challenges caused by the various Covid lockdowns, the hospital, next to the Queenstown Country Club, bordering Shotover Country, was on track to be handed over from developer Queenstown Commercial before Christmas.
Quality performance
Our approach and commitment to safety
At Southern Cross Central Lakes Hospital, our aim is to provide you with the best care. We do that in a variety of ways, including by:
- Asking you about your experience with us.
- Listening to your feedback so we understand what matters to you.
- Engaging with you to design our services with your needs first.
- Monitoring and managing risks to continually improve the safety and quality of the care we provide.
- Following recommended best practice.
Patient safety programmes in our hospital
The safety of patients, staff and specialists is paramount to everything we do.
Hand hygiene
One of the simplest things we can all do to reduce infection spreading is to clean our hands correctly. While this is true both at home and in the hospital setting, it is particularly important in hospitals because surgical procedures increase the potential risk of infection. Hand hygiene is a vital component of our infection prevention and control programme and is aligned with the World Health Organisation recommendations.
We ask our people and medical specialists to consistently practice good hand hygiene and encourage our patients to review the following resources before coming to hospital:
Kōrero Mai - Talk to Me
We want our patients and their whānau to feel confident to speak up if they have a concern about their condition. We respect that patients and whānau are sometimes able to recognise early signs of physical deterioration in themselves or their family members. Kōrero Mai – Talk to Me is a process where you can voice your concerns and expect an appropriate response in a timely manner.
The Kōrero Mai - Talk to Me escalation process has three steps:
- Press the call bell and talk to your nurse.
- Ask to talk to the Nurse in Charge.
- If you are still concerned or need help, call our senior nursing team.
New Zealand Early Warning Scores (NZEWS)
Southern Cross Central Lakes Hospital uses the national standardised vital signs char,t New Zealand Early Warning Scores (NZEWS), supported by localised clinical escalation pathways, to provide clear and objective criteria that prompts our healthcare team members to call for help when there is concern that a patient may be deteriorating.
Good communication and teamwork underpin our clinical components. We provide education and training so our healthcare staff have the skills and tools needed, and we measure performance to inform continuous improvement.
Surgical Site Infection Surveillance Programme
Surgical Site Infections (otherwise known as a SSIs or wound infections) are one of the most commonly reported complications associated with surgery.
We try to minimise the risk of SSIs as much as possible whilst you are in hospital, and after you go home, by taking the following steps:
- Asking patients to identify risk factors on their patient admission forms, and where possible addressing these factors prior to admission.
- Making patient health recommendations including the encouragement of good hand hygiene.
- Following stringent practices in our operating theatres as well as pre-operative and post-operative settings.
- Monitoring infections through our Surgical Site Infection Surveillance Programme.
- Investigating any patient SSI, reviewing procedures, and providing feedback to our medical specialists and nursing teams.
Our hospital uses the Southern Cross Healthcare Surgical Site Infection Surveillance Programme, which focuses on procedures with a high risk for post-operative infection, and involves standardised monitoring and testing for SSIs. If a patient’s procedure falls under our current SSI Programme hospital benchmark, one of our staff will contact the patient about their wound healing. In the case of any wound infection, there will be a full investigation to ensure we have followed accepted good practice and identify any potential for quality improvements.
Adverse Events
Keeping our patients safe and providing the best quality care is our highest priority. However, we recognise that events that adversely affect patients do happen. We work to ensure any adverse event occurring in our hospitals is detected, investigated and learned from. We encourage a safety culture that is underpinned by open communication and ongoing learning.
We take adverse events seriously and part of this includes ensuring that the wellbeing of patients and whānau is the focus of our review and investigations.
As a patient or whānau, we recognise the important role that you play. We encourage you to be involved in your care and to ask questions and tell us how you are. We always want to hear from you.
We encourage you to be involved in the care that you or a family member is receiving, to ask questions, and to let us know how you or your family members are doing:
- Please raise any concerns or ask questions. This could be with your specialist or one of our nursing team.
- Kōrero Mai - Talk to Me is a pathway for patient and whānau to speak up about any health or wellbeing concerns while in hospital.
- Provide feedback. We appreciate your honest feedback following your stay as this helps us to confirm what we do well and to identify areas where we can improve.
Transfers to a secondary or tertiary hospital
In the event of complication with a procedure, patients may need to be transferred to a secondary or tertiary hospital. To minimise the chance of a transfer being needed, all our high-risk procedures and patients are assessed by a local anaesthesiologist and we do not accept procedures with high transfer risk.
Within the Agreement to Treatment Form we explain to all patients that transportation to a secondary or tertiary hospital can take significant time (due to distance, weather, or other extenuating factors) and offer them the opportunity to have their procedure in a hospital closer to a tertiary hospital.