Epic is on the move!

The moving trucks are rolling in at Epic, with not one but two of our sites on the move before the end of the financial year.

The first to pack is a big one, with our Aged Care Pharmacy team at Greenslopes moving out of the space they have occupied at Greenslopes Private Hospital for many, many years and making their way to a new home — still in the same postcode, but on the other side of the M1 at Ipswich Rd. It’s a big transition, with the team here responsible for the delivery of medication management services to thousands of residents of nursing homes throughout Brisbane and the Gold Coast, and marks the end of a significant era. We’ve been operating a pharmacy at Ramsay’s Greenslopes campus for just over 20 years, and while we haven’t delivered the direct hospital pharmacy service for some time now, it will still be sad for many of our long term team members to say goodbye to the hospital community we’ve worked with over such an extended period.

When one door closes another opens, and the space that we are vacating will now be occupied by our sister company ROQ, as they move in and commence construction of a new, state of-the-art radiation oncology facility which is scheduled to open later this year. We know they will enjoy the same warm, professional interaction that we have always expererienced with the Ramsay team at Greenslopes, and are pleased that the long term relationship between our two organisations is continuing, albeit in a changed format.

Our Aged Care team is excited about the move, and looking forward to the new location and the opportunities it brings. While we’ve loved our time at GPH, our basement location has definitely provided some challenges in terms of layout and workflows, and moving to an open plan environment with no pillars will definitely facilitate some positive change! Planning for this move is well underway, and we expect to be settled in our new home by the end of May.

The other move that’s underway will see our head office moving to a new location in South Brisbane as Epic Pharmacy Management becomes part of the wider Icon Consolidated Holdings group, as flagged in this post at the end of last year. Bringing together the corporate services activities of Epic Pharmacy, Icon Cancer Care and ROQ is an important way of continuing to ensure that we, along with the rest of the healthcare sector, strive to ensure health services are delivered in the most cost effective manner possible, with maximum resources devoted to patient-focused, front end service delivery.

The location selected means many of our team will for the first time be able to consider travel to work via the public transport network as a viable option (trying to access our current location at Mansfield via public transport is not dissimilar to the movie Planes, Trains and Automobiles) and while we absolutely love our coffee van operator David, as one of the coffee addicts on the team I have to admit it will be nice to have the opportunity to access a good coffee at times other than his regular as clockwork 10am visit!

We’re also keen to utilise the opportunities that the close by Southbank Parklands present to expand some of our wellness activities, and a number of our teams are already planning to incorporate outdoor and walking meetings into their schedules. Watch out for some serious competition in our FitBit daily totals!

With the opportunity to walk across the office to catch up with our colleagues at Icon and ROQ rather than liasing through email and phone, we’re really confident that no shortage of new ideas and opportunities for synergies will be generated, and can’t wait to see the innovations that flow as a result.

Our Facebook page will be sharing plenty of images as the moves occur so you can all follow our progress, and while we are under no illusion about the amount of hard work and effort it’s going to take to have all of this activity completed before the end of the financial year, we’re pretty confident that the result is going to be Epic!