Barwon Health is one of Australia’s largest regional health services, with more than 10,000 staff and volunteers supporting the Geelong and southwest Victoria communities.
Context
In early 2025, Barwon Health introduced Raise It – a speak-up program designed to create psychological safety by making it easier for staff to raise concerns and trust that those concerns would be handled fairly and followed through.
Raise It was not intended as a standalone initiative. It was the first visible step in a broader shift by Barwon Health’s People & Culture team to strengthen how workplace issues are captured, understood, and responded to across the organisation.
Like many healthcare providers, Barwon Health recognised a gap between intent and experience. While policies existed and concerns were being raised, the underlying systems and processes were fragmented. Issues were tracked across emails, spreadsheets, and personal folders, making consistency, governance, and insight difficult to achieve at scale.
Raise It set a clear public commitment. The challenge for the People & Culture team was delivering on that commitment in a way that was reliable, defensible, and sustainable in a complex health environment.
The Challenge
Before Raise It, workplace matters were managed across a patchwork of tools and individual practices. Case information could sit in inboxes or personal drives, be recorded inconsistently, or be difficult to locate when reporting to leadership or accreditation bodies.
This fragmentation created three material risks:
- Governance risk – incomplete records, limited traceability, and reliance on individual knowledge
- Insight gaps – limited ability to see patterns, hotspots, or emerging risks
- Trust gaps – staff uncertainty about whether concerns would be handled consistently or at all
The People & Culture team also knew that some staff groups were not raising concerns through traditional channels. As the Director of HR observed, since the launch of Raise It, issues have been raised “that people hadn’t felt confident to raise previously”.
This work was also shaped by the evolving regulatory environment in Victoria, including new obligations around the identification and management of psychosocial hazards. Barwon Health recognised that meeting these expectations would require more than policy updates or training alone. It required reliable systems, consistent documentation, and the ability to demonstrate how concerns are identified, assessed, and acted on over time.
Phase One: Raise It as the Entry Point
Raise It was designed as a simple, accessible way for staff to speak up – including the option to do so anonymously. The program was intentionally human-centred, familiar in tone, and visible across the organisation.
Branding played a deliberate role. Barwon Health incorporated its heart logo into the Raise It identity, reinforced through posters, staff rooms, onboarding materials, and everyday touchpoints. The aim was to normalise speaking up, not frame it as punitive or exceptional.
Behind the Raise It experience sat structured case management, allowing the People & Culture team to receive, triage, and respond to concerns consistently from day one.
For staff, Raise It provided reassurance that concerns would not disappear. For the People & Culture team, it created a single, consistent way to manage matters that had previously been dispersed across the organisation.
What Changed Operationally
Moving Raise It into a structured case environment fundamentally changed how workplace matters were handled.
Instead of navigating emails, spreadsheets, and individual templates, the team worked from one shared system. Each matter followed a consistent workflow, with clear records, notes, decisions, and outcomes captured in one place.
This shift delivered immediate operational, resource and reporting benefits.
From Case Handling to Organisational Insight
Prior to Raise It, answering basic questions about trends or risks required manual effort and incomplete data. Each reporting cycle involved pulling together records from multiple sources, often with gaps or inconsistencies.
With all Raise It matters handled through a structured system, Barwon Health gained a reliable dataset for the first time. Issues could be analysed allowing the organisation to move beyond anecdote and reactiveness.
The next phase for the team was advanced analysis and prevention initiatives marking a major shift in the team’s impact.
As the benefits of structured case management became clear, Barwon Health identified opportunities to extend the same approach to other employee relations workflows.
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