Who are Uniting Care Queensland?

Uniting Care Queensland (UCQ) is a leading provider of health services, aged, community, and disability care in Queensland. The health and community arm of the Uniting Church of Queensland, UnitingCare operates more than 5200 residential aged care beds and provides the equivalent of 1.5 million days of care each year.

What is the size of UCQ’s mobile workforce?

The UnitingCare team also make more than 3.3 million visits to Queenslanders each year, providing the same holistic care, service and companionship that’s been its hallmark since the organisation began delivering community nursing services in 1953. The UnitingCare workforce is altruistic and community-minded; their focus is on helping others and supporting the vulnerable within the community they operate in.

In the early days, community nurses used public transport to travel to clients’ homes. Today, UnitingCare’s fleet has grown to more than 2,200 vehicles that travel 34 million kilometres each year.

What does road safety mean to UCQ?

With a fleet of 2,500 vehicles on the road we are committed to providing our drivers with the safest possible vehicles and the skills to ensure that they are safe both themselves and to the other drivers they share the road with. Uniting Care Queensland’s driver safety programs are fully integrated with our Zero Harm at Work policy reinforcing our commitment to the safety of our drivers. This commitment includes our relationship with peak bodies and centres of learning in further developing road safety initiatives that will benefit our drivers.

Supporting actions delivered by UCQ

Uniting Care Queensland's Contributions to the NRSPP & Points of Contact

  • Steering Committee Partners
  • Founding Partners
  • Working Group - B2B Safer Vehicles are Better Business
  • Working Group - Driver Headspace Working Group
  • Working Group – Grey Fleet
  • Mark StephensManager Fleet and Business Support

    UCQ is recognised as a Founding Steering Committee Partner to the present

    What are UCQ’s NRSPP road safety commitments?

    1. Seek position on the NRSPP Steering Committee
    2. Participate on relevant working groups
    3. Develop case study on driver education program and webinar

    UnitingCare Queensland: Sustained safety focus and risk management reduces crashes, insurance premiums and fleet costs

    Uniting Care Queensland (Formerly BlueCare) – Cutting accidents and reducing insurance premiums

  • Mark StephensManager Fleet and Business Support

    UVQ is recognised as one of the Founding Partners of NRSPP with Mark Stephens kindly helping design and build the foundational elements of the program during its establishment phase.

    Mark has been an incredibly passionate contributor since first joining the NRSPP Steering Committee

    NRSPP wishes to recognise the contributions of UCQ for helping develop the program.

  • Mark StephensManager Fleet and Business Support

    Mark Stephens was kind enough to feature as one of the experts in the NRSPP Business-to-Business Video which was kindly developed by IAG for NRSPP to pronote the Safe Vehicle Purchasing Guide.

    NRSPP B2B Video: Safer Vehicles are Better Business

  • Mark StephensManager Fleet and Business Support

    The NRSPP Driver Headspace Working Group was established the NRSPP Steering and by CBA through Laura Buckley. It was formed to explore how Emotional drivers are nearly 10x greater risk of being involved in a crash whereas a driver conversing on the mobile phone is 2.2 and texting is 6.1.

    UCQ was one of the forming partners of the Working Group due to the pressure its workers face in helping the Queensland community.

    The concern was that being emotional can cloud your judgement and on the road, a vehicle can easily become an outlet for that emotion. Equally an emotional driver is more easily distracted or prone to distraction when driving. To explore the Driver Headspace issue in further detail NRSPP in 2016 conducted research exploring emotional driving triggered by negative and stressful/circumstances and how it was another form of driver distraction. The term used was Driver Headspace’ thus refers to the state of a driver’s psycho-physiological functioning as a result of exposure to a stressful event or adverse circumstance. The research was conducted by Prof. Mike Reagan. The research found

    • Driver headspace events can derive from a myriad of negative and stressful events/circumstances and can be categorised based on whether they occur within or outside the workplace, and on whether they are traumatic or non-traumatic in nature.
    • There is a high prevalence of driver headspace events across different professional driving work positions due to multiple work-related stressors and increased prevalence of mental health issues.
    • Mindfulness can improve focus and emotion management and reduce distraction. It is both an everyday experience and something that can be enhanced through training. Mindfulness training has been shown to significantly improve sustained attention, working memory, distractibility, emotional reactivity, behavioural regulation, empathy and prosocial behaviours.

    New Studies since have shown driving while in an emotional state is far more likely to result in a crash than being tired or using a mobile phone.

  • Mark StephensManager Fleet and Business Support

    UCQ was an active partner of the Grey Fleet Working Group and contributed to the development of the guide.

    A key deliverable of the Working Group was the Grey Fleet Guide

    NRSPP Guide: Grey Fleet Safety Management