The George Centre

About the client

Part of Acurio Healthcare Group, The George Centre is a 57-bed private day and maternity hospital in Camden, NSW. As a hospital, efficient facilities management is critical to keep the building running and maintain the safety of patients, staff and visitors.

Opening in 2023, the hospital provides the Camden community with world-class facilities and specialist services in maternity, surgery and endoscopy.

The opportunity

George Kalogiannis is The George Centre’s Facility Manager. With extensive experience over 13 years managing hospital facilities across Sydney, implementing a dedicated facilities management system for The George Centre was an absolute no-brainer. George explains:

“Everyone in the healthcare industry realistically needs to be using a system. There are so many moving parts, and making sure the building can run 24/7 is about saving lives; not to mention the compliance requirements and the importance of auditable records.”

The George Centre team wanted to ensure a solution was implemented prior to opening and had a goal of paperless operations to fulfil compliance requirements and operate efficiently by making important information available at the touch of a button.

The journey

While The George Centre team knew straight away that they needed from a system, the question of which system would best suit their needs was considered carefully.

George explains: “I had used other systems in previous roles, so had an idea of what to look for. FMI started coming up in conversations with stakeholders, and I was hearing a lot of good feedback, so I decided to do my research, and compare it with the other systems available in the marketplace."

"It was the simplicity of FMI that really set it apart. It has all the functionality we need for the facility management side, but for facility users it makes it so simple to log a maintenance request. The experience for them is great.”

Running the operations with a lean team, the level of support offered by FMI was also a key driver in the decision to implement the solution. Working with FMI’s onboarding team, it took just a few months for The George Centre to have assets loaded; facility users actively logging requests; and to actively utilise planned maintenance and reporting functionality.

“The priority for us was getting our assets loaded into FMI. We had thousands of assets, so we leaned on the FMI team to get those into the system which was so helpful. It would have been daunting for to input all that data ourselves while also staying on top of the day-to-day, but the FMI team really helped us get where we needed to be.

The support has been excellent, no matter what question I had, the FMI team would come back straight away with an answer. They’ve been incredibly patient and kept us on track. It feels like I’ve worked with the FMI team forever already, it’s just been a really good experience.”

With the help of the FMI team, The George Centre was able to get up and running quickly with planned maintenance. As a hospital, The George Centre has multiple systems and assets with planned maintenance requirements. Taking a strategic approach, the team started with those systems critical for compliance and regulation.

George describes their progress so far:

“We got systems like our HVAC, fire, water testing and HEPA filtering in straight away. Leveraging FMI for our planned maintenance helps to reduce any chance of error, keeping that work on track even if I’m not here, and ensuring we always have a clear paper trail. When planned maintenance is due, both the contractors and I get the reminder and we can make it happen.”

While assets and planned maintenance have been streamlining the back-end work for the facilities team, the impact of FMI has been felt more broadly across the business. Effective expectation management and communication with facility users have helped improve their interactions with the facilities team.

George explains the impact this has had:

“As with anything, we had a couple of teething problems at the start; but they were tiny little things. We started refusing verbal or email requests and directing people to the platform to encourage them to try out the system. It didn’t take much to get people using the system. I made up some little support sheets with the help of the FMI team, which made it very simple for users to log a request.

Once they started using it and started getting status updates on their job and getting things like notifications when their job was completed, the enthusiasm for the process grew and adoption got better and better. I have a lot of contact time with our facility users and get some great anecdotal feedback while I’m out in the hospital.”

Looking to the future

The George Centre made quick work of ensuring FMI would meet their day-to-day operational needs and are now looking to expand their use of the solution to support strategic objectives.

As the amount of data available in the system grows with use, George and his team will be looking to leverage more of the reporting aspects within FMI. He talks about some of their goals for the coming 12 months:

“This year is about developing our baselines for future KPIs. It is amazing to see the data we already have available in the system, response times, resolution times, and even things like the number of requested jobs vs planned jobs.

It is already helping to keep us accountable as a team and understand our performance, so I’m excited to see what we will be able to do in the future. We want to be able to look at an asset and make a data-informed decision around repair and replacement, and that is well within reach.”