Managing disaster during TC Alfred in the Darling Downs and West Moreton

The aftermath of TC Alfred (March 2025) was thankfully less impactful in our region than advance predictions had anticipated, none the less, the period of time leading up to, during and immediately after the event was an extremely busy and anxious time for healthcare practices in the Darling Downs and West Moreton region.

From 4 - 11 March, the PHN managed ongoing communications with our primary care health professionals to ensure they were enacting their disaster management plans and to provide support to any who did not have a plan in place. We stood up our IMT (Incident Management Team), and key staff met daily at 8.30am (including the weekend) to understand the current status and roll out activities and communications in response to the needs of the day.

Our primary care support team liaised with every general practice in the region with regards to their opening status, their GP availability for Evacuation Centres and to offer disaster management support. Of 190 practices in the region, 43 closed early on the Thursday, 67 closed on the Friday, 27 closed on the Saturday and 14 closed on the Sunday. All practices indicated they had measures in place to manage disaster, some also had arrangements in place with local hospitals to support patients if/while they were closed.

Our website became an information hub providing latest news and resources, with 178 views of our Being Disaster Ready webpage, 163 views of our TC Alfred news and 110 views of our Urgent Care page, which we regularly updated with any changes to opening times of the Medicare UCCs in our region.

In all we delivered over 4,500 emails to general practices, allied health practices and pharmacies across the 8-day period. We also delivered over 500 alert text messages to stakeholders, accruing 27 new subscribers to receive these SMS alerts in the early days of the event. We received very positive feedback on the regularity and usefulness of these communications from our stakeholders.

We introduced SMS updates to our internal communications as well, supplementing daily email updates, with weekend text messages to cater for any staff not able to access emails/experiencing power outages.

We would like to acknowledge all healthcare workers, as well as our own staff who went above and beyond working on their days off and weekends to ensure communications and interactions with patients and stakeholders were reliable and seamless.