Booran Health

Booran Health is built to put care as close to mob as possible, and to take pressure off a public health system that is already stretched. Our people carry a heavier health load, and too often the nearest help is fifteen or twenty minutes away. So the care comes first, on the ground, from day one.

It has two arms. The first, respite care, looks after families who come to Newcastle for treatment, for a child or for themselves. It starts with care coordinators, who take every piece of planning off the family so parents can be parents and doctors can be doctors, then respite homes that feel like a home and not a hotel, with a family car at the door, meals in the fridge, a private jet or helicopter from a regional airport when it is needed, and for the little heroes leaving hospital, a supercar joyride home. The second, Booran Health Medical Services (BHMS), is health services on the ground: event triage at big gatherings like the Koori Knockout, with medical vans beside the field, electric medical carts and a large medical semi-trailer as the base of operations, a medical fleet that includes helicopters and medically fitted jets, urgent care clinics that also dispatch the emergency vehicles, and regional care centres.

A regional care centre brings state-of-the-art healthcare and transport services to the regions, with air transport behind it: a helicopter and a private jet on the apron, joined to the runway, so a patient from the outback can be flown to the city for specialised treatment. A project of this size is funded the way hospitals are: government and philanthropic grants, sponsors and investors, through a not-for-profit structure. So a big part of our work is the vision itself, which lets a funder see what a regional care centre will look like before a brick is laid.