Award Winning Volunteer Team
Banksia Palliative Care Volunteer Team was honoured at this year’s Jagajaga Community Australia Day Awards, held at Viewbank College Performing Arts Centre on Saturday 26th January.
Representatives of Banksia’s Volunteer Team, Bev, Leonie and Maria, joined other award recipients on Saturday to collect the award presented by The Honourable Jenny Macklin MP.
The event was a fabulous way to thank volunteers across the Jagajaga Community for their support, encouragement and assistance in ensuring local services are able to continue to deliver outstanding services.
Banksia is very proud to have volunteers working with us. Banksia volunteers work closely with our multidisciplinary team to provide holistic care to our clients and the greater community. As with all of our team members, Volunteers are vital to ensuring Banksia provides the highest quality community palliative care to our clients and their families and friends. They allow us to offer our clients extra services, which we may not otherwise have the capacity to achieve – services which have a very positive impact on the well-being of our clients and their carers. We also have a group of volunteers who assist in the office – their support, loyalty and consistency allows our staff to achieve extra duties, therefore improving our capacity to achieve and impacting positively on the services we offer to our clients.
Palliative Care is a challenging area to work in – all of our clients have been diagnosed with a life-limiting illness. Our Volunteers visit people who they know are going to die –they assist in an area (palliative care) that others are reluctant to consider – they do this because they are giving, caring people. They undertake duties with Banksia, knowing there will be sadness and yet they still do it selflessly. They are a quality team and worthy of recognition.
Without our dedicated team of volunteers Banksia would not be able to provide the same level of care and specialised home based palliative care, based on individual needs to every person living with a life-limiting illness within our community. Our Volunteer team, linked in with both our clients and staff, ensure we don’t lose sight of the person we are providing a service for, they help to remind us there is a person and a family involved not just a disease we are managing.